Bullet Proof..I Wish I Was

early

It is one of the older songs on The Bends. The archive's first performance is On The Edge in New York on 25 June 1993, during the long Pablo Honey tour, nearly two years before the album. It was played once that year and once in 1994, and then left alone until the record was out.

the manor

When the RAK sessions stalled in the spring of 1994, the band went touring and came back to the Manor in Oxfordshire in July. Phil Selway named two songs that found their vitality there, after weeks of playing the new material live: “Bones” and this one.

The way it was built is the story. Jonny Greenwood and Ed O'Brien made the guitar parts without hearing the rest of the track. The 2003 page describes the two of them recording their noises with no idea of the other layers, and those passes being put together and mixed in with the song afterwards. You can hear it: the guitars float over the song instead of following it.

O'Brien's delay pedal was the tool for that kind of thing. He called the Boss DD-5 central to the sound of the album, and a 2026 piece on the sessions for the studio retailer Vintage King lists “Bullet Proof” among the songs where its pads and feedback do the work. In the mix, by Sean Slade and Paul Q. Kolderie, Selway's drums leave plenty of open space around them, which PopMatters noticed in 2025.

wax and pins

Yorke wishes for armour. The body in the song is being taken apart a piece at a time, then shaped like wax, then stuck with heated pins, which is a voodoo doll described from the inside. Late on he offers to let someone pay and take a shot at him.

It was the song reviewers pointed at when they decided Yorke had serious personal problems; the 2003 notes argued against that, reading it as wider than one man's trouble and leaving room for the listener's own. Bill Reed, in Colorado's Gazette, heard the quieter side of the record in it and in “High and Dry”.

acoustic, on cd2

An acoustic version, recorded live at the Eve's Club, went out as the third track on the second CD of “Fake Plastic Trees”, released on 15 May 1995, next to acoustic takes of “Fake Plastic Trees” and “Street Spirit (Fade Out)”. It runs 3:34, six seconds longer than the album version, and without the other two guitarists' noises it is a different song: a ballad, and a plain one.

on stage

Once the album was out it went into the set properly: sixty-three nights in 1995, eighteen in 1996, thirty-eight in 1997 and fourteen in 1998. In PopMatters' thirtieth-anniversary series Sean McCarthy called it the nearest thing the band have written to a campfire song, which on stage is about right.

After 1998 it became an occasional guest: three nights in 2000, two in 2001, two in 2003, one in 2004. The last of those was Makuhari Messe in Chiba on 18 April 2004, and then nothing for 1,478 days until the Cruzan Amphitheatre in West Palm Beach on 5 May 2008. The final outing so far was the Tokyo International Forum on 8 October 2008. A hundred and forty-five nights in all, once as the opener and once as the closer.