Bones

rak, then the manor

It was new in February 1994. The archive first has it at the Royal Berks Hospital Social Club in Reading on the 21st, the night “Sulk” was first played too, and that month the band took it into RAK to start the album.

The RAK sessions stalled, and after touring Europe, Japan and Australasia through May and June, Radiohead spent two weeks in July at the Manor in Oxfordshire, where they finished “Bones”, “Sulk” and “The Bends”. Phil Selway put it down to the gigs. Playing the songs live again had put the band back together, and he named “Bones” and “Bullet Proof” as the two that found their vitality there.

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

thom yorke, via this site's 2003 lyrics page

Ed O'Brien, writing for the band's fan-club booklet, remembered it as a first or second take, done the same day as “The Bends”. Either way, the first version had ended with about a minute and a half of outro, an idea Jonny Greenwood took from the Fall, and John Leckie, producing The Bends, had worked on the Fall's The Wonderful and Frightening World of.... The long ending did not survive, and the album take runs 3:09, the shortest on the record. Like most of the record it was mixed by Sean Slade and Paul Q. Kolderie. A live take from the London Forum on 24 March 1995 went out later on B-sides, on the second CD of “Just” and the Irish single of “The Bends”.

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 gives the song its title. The bridge goes back to childhood and a time he could fly like Peter Pan.

This site's 2003 notes grouped it with “My Iron Lung” as another of Thom 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 the running order it comes straight after two ballads, “High and Dry” and “Fake Plastic Trees”, and puts the pace back.

reading, unaccompanied

For two years it was a song to start with. It opened 27 gigs, from Gloucester on 25 August 1994 to Torhout on 6 July 1996, short support sets for R.E.M. in Berlin and Hartford among them, and in 1995, the year The Bends came out, it was in the set on 88 nights.

At Reading on 27 August 1994 Yorke walked out onto the main stage alone and sang Tim Buckley's “Sing a Song for You” with no accompaniment at all, and the band came in behind him with “Bones”. Five of the 13 songs that day were not in the shops yet. Andrew Mueller, reviewing the festival for Melody Maker, thought none of the new ones were built for a stage that size.

a bit like status quo

It stayed through the OK Computer tour, 64 nights in 1997, further down the running order, and after that it came and went. In 2003 Yorke told Magnet that whenever the band dug it up it never worked and sounded a bit like Status Quo. A short run that year ended at Chiba Marine Stadium on 3 August, and 1,016 days later it was back at the Civic Hall in Wolverhampton on 15 May 2006 for one more summer, which ended in Budapest on 12 August 2006.

the peter pan line

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, which he said brings a lump to his throat.