Thom Yorke had meant to quit Radiohead, NME reports

Thom Yorke had decided to leave Radiohead once their second American tour was over, Stuart Bailie reports in this week's NME. That was in the winter of 1993, with the five of them barely talking on the bus, in what Ed O'Brien calls a bad patch. Before the first night of a European tour supporting James, in Hamburg, the band held an emergency meeting and agreed to carry on.

Bailie's feature is about “My Iron Lung”, out now, and the song comes out of the same year. Yorke started it on the morning he pulled out of Reading in 1993 with no voice (a Harley Street specialist put the tension in his neck down to stress), and finished it in America. The title is from a photograph of a child in a 1950s iron lung that he kept for six months. He agrees with Bailie that the song is aimed at “Creep” and everything that came with it.

It's me trying to kill the beast.

Thom Yorke¹

Months in the studio with John Leckie did not give them a version they wanted. Bailie reports that the band went with the take from the London Astoria on 27 May, which Leckie was at and MTV taped, much as Jonny Greenwood's first-take guitar was kept on “Creep”. The sleeve is a television picture of legs and a limousine, copied down four generations of video.

On “You Never Wash Up After Yourself”, a new song, Phil Selway can be heard walking out mid-take because he thought it was a rehearsal. The band have recently played Sopot, near Gdansk, in a country where Pablo Honey has sold 152 copies.