Black Star

the house engineer

The Bends began at RAK Studios in St John's Wood in February 1994, and one of the studio's in-house engineers was Nigel Godrich, who had come up through RAK's trainee system. With John Leckie, the album's producer, away, Godrich and the band stayed behind to work on B-sides, and “Black Star” was one of them. They liked it too much to leave it there, and it went onto the album.

The people who were there remember it differently. In the fan-club booklet Answerphone 01, where the five go through the album track by track, it was cut in an afternoon, after an hour's rehearsal, with Leckie away at a wedding. Phil Selway's version is a weekend when Leckie was away and someone suggested trying a few songs with Nigel. Colin Greenwood put it later, while Leckie was mixing the album at Abbey Road. Godrich's own memory is later and odder again. Thom Yorke rang him a few months after Godrich thought the album was finished and asked him to record the band in their rehearsal space, and they did three or four songs, “Black Star” among them.

It felt like the adults were away and we could work without any restrictions.

nigel godrich · rolling stone, 13 march 2020

a dressing gown at the end of the day

It is a relationship coming apart at home. He gets back from work and she is still in her dressing gown; he tries to follow what is going on in her head and cannot; it has been 58 hours since he last slept with her. The chorus hands the blame to anything in the sky that will take it, a star, the sky itself, a satellite. The site's 2003 notes read a third person into the later verses.

Yorke never explained it, but on stage in 1995 and 1996 he introduced it several ways, and the 2003 page kept one of them.

Sex in the morning. Which is the best time to have it. As long as you've cleaned your teeth beforehand.

thom yorke, introducing it on stage, 1995–96, via this site's 2003 lyrics page

eight years out

It reached the stage before the album was finished, at the Vidia International Rock Club in Cesena on 13 May 1994, and was in the set on forty-six nights in 1995. At the Metro in Chicago in April 1996 the Chicago Tribune's critic wished the guitars would back off for most of the night, and made an exception for the chorus of “Black Star”, where Yorke and Ed O'Brien sang in harmony.

After a single night in 1998, at Akasaka Blitz in Tokyo on 23 January, it was gone for 3,025 days. It came back at KB Hallen in Copenhagen on 6 May 2006, the first night of a tour that also brought back “Let Down”, and stayed for seven nights, the last of them at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley on 24 June.

the credit

The liner notes credit Leckie on every track except “High and Dry”, and give “Black Star” one more line, production by Godrich and Radiohead. Like most of the record it was mixed by Sean Slade and Paul Q. Kolderie. It is the loosest-sounding thing on the album, a fade-in that finds the band already playing, and Evan Sawdey, writing in PopMatters for the record's thirtieth anniversary, heard Blur in it, down to a pre-chorus he traced to Graham Coxon.

It is the only song on The Bends with Godrich's name as its producer, and he has produced every Radiohead album since.

Everything after that was Nigel.

colin greenwood · louisville public media, 6 november 2024