1995

The record is weeks away, with a double A-side single first, a British tour across February and March, and then months abroad.

A set heavy with songs from The Bends, still unreleased, is enough for the review to lift Radiohead into the first rank.

With The Bends four days away, the double A-side sent out ahead of it has given the band a top 20 single and a television slot.

The interview finds the pair on a promotional trip round Europe, looking back on sessions for the record that at first went badly.

A year after the first sessions began, the second album is in the shops and in the top ten in its first week.

The singer and the critic came away from the last night of the tour for The Bends with opposite verdicts on the same show.

From Germany's Spex to the American papers, critics split over whether Radiohead are a band with depth or a one-hit wonder.

Selway explains why The Bends took months to make, with “Creep” hanging over a band who had only ever made one record.

Even with a gold album behind them, Radiohead have needed MTV's help to get their second record noticed in the United States.

Weeks of promotion for The Bends left Jonny Greenwood ranting that they should sign to an obscure indie label, he tells Ted Kessler in Madrid.

Two songs from The Bends go out on British television while the band themselves are in America.

The next single from The Bends has climbed into the British top 20 while the band tour America, where it is their first single from the album.

The call to re-release “Creep” reached a tour bus by fax, and Thom Yorke now reckons the band will write four or five more like it.

Yorke has no sympathy for rock stars who wallow, and says the album people hear as a cry for help was partly written for laughs.

Much of America still knows Radiohead as the band behind “Creep”, but the Twin Cities have already decided there is more to them.

Two years after “Creep” first took them round America, the band come back with a different single to lead and a set that no longer saves the hit for last.

Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood praise John Leckie, and Yorke calls these the first studio sessions the band have fully enjoyed.

An American critic who came round to “Creep” late wanted a whole album like it, and finds a band running from the one thing it does well.

Ten new songs will start to surface on B-sides before Christmas, though NME expects no new album until autumn 1996.

Given to Curfew in December 1991, it finds Thom Yorke already sure the band will not sit and wait for luck.

Radiohead start their American dates with R.E.M. in Miami on Friday, in front of the biggest crowds they have played to in the States.

Jon Wiederhorn's profile finds a singer at ease only in front of a microphone, in a band too polite to leave a mess.

Ahead of two nights opening for R.E.M., Yorke and Colin Greenwood explain why the band went back to the start for their second album.

Radiohead are opening for R.E.M. on the Monster tour, and in Florida they won over the local critic.

Between their R.E.M. support dates, the band give Boston radio its lunch hour from the Cambridge studio where The Bends was mixed.

A Spanish-language review admires the singing and four songs, but had hoped for more after “Creep”.

A day each from the five, from Truro to Aberdeen, gives the week The Bends came out as the band lived it.

With the R.E.M. dates behind them, the band tried out a new song in a small club, under a working title it would carry through the autumn.

Police have found the van but not the instruments, and the band and Capitol are offering a cash reward to get them back.

Thom Yorke tells Andrew Mueller the next record should be a celebration, because that would be the real challenge for Radiohead.

The London night of the autumn tour runs to 21 songs, with nearly all of The Bends and two that are not on any record yet.

Every member writes his own letter this time, between the end of the American tours and the start of a winter in Britain and Europe.

After the rows that went into The Bends, the band want to make the next record at an easier pace, and NME's cover story says the label has agreed.

With a year on the road nearly over, Yorke wants the next album made far from everyone, somewhere remote in England.

On bills crowded with Oasis, Bush and Alanis Morissette, two critics pick out Radiohead, one of whom had expected a one-hit wonder.

All five members talk through the new album song by song, alongside a band history that starts at Abingdon School.

Label paperwork written for the shops shows how hard EMI means to push Radiohead's second album, from fan preview nights to a cheaper Pablo Honey.

An autumn that ran from Shepherds Bush to Bangkok, Mexico City and the first Thom and Jonny duo shows also brought Phil Selway and the crew down in Boston on two engines.