Bones

reading

The first performance in the archive is the Royal Berks Hospital Social Club in Reading on 21 February 1994, the same night “Sulk” was first played, and the same month the band moved into RAK to start the album. The setting is hard to improve on for a song about joints and painkillers.

the manor

The RAK sessions stalled. After touring Europe, Japan and Australasia through May and June, Radiohead spent two weeks in July at the Manor in Oxfordshire, and there they completed “Bones”, “Sulk” and “The Bends”. Mac Randall, writing in Guitar World, says songs that had caused no end of trouble earlier in the year went down with a minimum of fuss. Phil Selway put it down to the gigs: playing the material live again had put the band back together, and “Bones” and “Bullet Proof” were the songs he named as finding their vitality there.

We recorded this about four times before we got it right.

thom yorke, via this site's 2003 lyrics page

The first version ended with about a minute and a half of outro, an idea Jonny Greenwood had taken from the Fall. John Leckie, as it happens, had worked on the Fall's The Wonderful and Frightening World of... The long ending did not survive. At 3:09 the album take is the shortest song on The Bends, and like most of the record it was mixed by Sean Slade and Paul Q. Kolderie.

shoulders, wrists, knees

The verses are an inventory of a body failing: joints listed one by one, stairs he can no longer climb, a prescription named outright. The chorus is the title phrase, feeling it in your bones. The bridge goes back to childhood and a time he could fly like Peter Pan.

The 2003 notes grouped it with “My Iron Lung” as another of Yorke's songs about bad health, probably fed by the wear of touring, and read it as a fear of growing old and being unable to move. In PopMatters' thirtieth-anniversary series Scott Elingburg called it the palate cleanser of the running order, putting the tempo back after two ballads in a row.

live at the forum

The song had a second life on B-sides. A recording from the London Forum on 24 March 1995 sits on the American promo CD of “The Bends” and on the Irish single, released on 26 July 1996. A live “Bones” was also on the second CD of “Just” and on the Australian “Just” single, and a Belgian promo in 1996 paired “The Bends” with “Bones”.

two hundred and sixty-four nights

It was a staple for as long as The Bends was the record being toured: twenty-eight nights in 1994, eighty-six in 1995, twenty-four in 1996 and sixty-four in 1997, when it was also doing a turn in the OK Computer sets. Twenty-nine in 1998, nineteen in 2000, then four apiece in 2001 and 2003.

The 2003 run ended at Chiba Marine Stadium on 3 August 2003. It came back 1,016 days later at the Civic Hall in Wolverhampton on 15 May 2006, for six nights, and the last of them was Óbudai-Sziget in Budapest on 12 August 2006. It has not been played since. Two hundred and sixty-four nights, twenty-four of them as the opener and one as the closer.

a lump in the throat

When Ricky Gervais was Kirsty Young's castaway on Desert Island Discs, “Bones” was his Radiohead pick. What got him was the Peter Pan line and the way the music lifts under it.

it brings a lump to my throat.

ricky gervais · desert island discs, bbc radio 4