Thom Yorke tells Caitlin Moran The Bends is no diary of depression

Caitlin Moran spent a day and a night with Radiohead in Rome at the start of May and has written it up twice, for The Times on 19 May and at greater length as “Head Cases” in the 10 June Melody Maker. In both, Thom Yorke says The Bends is not a diary of his depression, and the title track's wish to be back in the Sixties was never meant straight. We wrote that line as a joke. We were taking the mickey. We all found that song hilarious.¹

The gig Moran saw was a radio broadcast she calls Cornetto FM, with EMI Italia's staff in seats ringed around the stage and, she says, four million listening. Colin Greenwood walked on first and realised he was alone. Yorke, Jonny Greenwood, Ed O'Brien and Phil Selway were watching him through a small window at the back, pointing and laughing. Radiohead's only Rome dates that spring were the Primo Maggio concert in Piazza San Giovanni on 1 May and a broadcast session at RAI's centre on Via Asiago the next day.

Moran admits she once crossed festival fields to avoid Radiohead. She now ranks The Bends the best rock album since Nevermind. Yorke kept to his hotel room most of the day, and she got her talk with him at 2am at a rowdy restaurant table, the crew on grappa and the band on red wine. To Melody Maker Yorke calls “The Bends” the band's Bowie pastiche and wishes he had never written it, because every interviewer asks him about the Sixties. No, I don't wish it was the fucking sixties - Levis jeans wish it was the sixties - I certainly fucking don't.²

He stands by every word of Melody Maker's earlier cover feature by the Stud Brothers, though not by its conclusions. He objects to the paper's debate that set his album beside Nirvana's In Utero and the Manic Street Preachers' The Holy Bible. He tells The Times he has been through bad times and written about them, but has no sympathy for rock stars who run into self-damage and then complain. Misery, he says, is easy; being happy is tougher.

O'Brien says that in the “Creep” years the band seemed to be living the same four and a half minutes over and over, and Melody Maker reckons the American tour with the song nearly finished them off. Doing acoustic versions of Creep for radio station jingles. Being the Creep pimple.¹

Yorke never thought “Bullet Proof..I Wish I Was” would work, because it was too slow. He finds the whole record uncomfortable to hear, but reckons it beats the competition, Bush included. Asked whether the start of “Planet Telex” was lifted from Paul McCartney's “Live and Let Die”, he says no. We nicked “Planet Telex” from “Tago Mago” by Can. So fuck off, we are arty us.²