Black Star

the teacher is out

The Bends began at RAK Studios in St John's Wood in February 1994, and one of the studio's in-house engineers on the sessions was Nigel Godrich, who had come up through RAK's trainee system. When John Leckie left to attend a social engagement (a wedding, according to Rolling Stone), Godrich and the band stayed behind to work on B-sides. “Black Star” was one of them. They liked it enough to move it onto the album.

The people who were there do not quite agree on how it happened. Phil Selway remembers a weekend when Leckie was away and suggested they try some songs with Nigel. Godrich's own memory, told to Rolling Stone in 2020, is later and odder: Yorke rang him a few months after he 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

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. It is the only song on The Bends with Godrich's name as producer. Like most of the record it was mixed by Sean Slade and Paul Q. Kolderie. Godrich produced every Radiohead album after it.

“Black Star” is a beautiful song and that went really well.

colin greenwood · rolling stone, 13 march 2020

It is the loosest-sounding thing on the album, a fade-in that finds the band already playing. 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.

a dressing gown at the end of the day

It is a relationship coming apart at home. He gets back from work and she has not got dressed; he tries to follow what is going on in her head and cannot; he has lost count of the hours since he slept. 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.

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

eighty-nine nights

It reached the stage before the album was finished: Vidia International Rock Club, Cesena, on 13 May 1994. Thirteen nights that year, forty-five in 1995, fourteen in 1996, nine in 1997, and then one last outing at Akasaka Blitz in Tokyo on 23 January 1998.

After that it was gone for 3,025 days, until KB Hallen in Copenhagen on 6 May 2006. It stayed in the set for seven nights of that tour, the last of them at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley on 24 June 2006. Eighty-nine nights in the archive, one as the opener and four as the closer.