Bullet Proof..I Wish I Was

a record shop in nancy

It is one of the older songs on The Bends, and its earliest known airing was in a record shop. On 15 June 1993, in the middle of the long Pablo Honey tour, Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood played a six-song acoustic set in the auditorium of the FNAC record shop in Nancy, and by the notes with the tape this was one of two new songs in it. Ten days later Yorke and Jonny Greenwood played it again, for television, at On The Edge in New York, nearly two years before the album, and then hardly touched it on stage until the record was out.

Yorke never thought it would work, he told Caitlin Moran in 1995, because it was too slow.

the manor

When the sessions at RAK Studios in London 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.

Jonny and Ed O'Brien made their guitar parts without hearing the rest of the track. This site's 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.

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. Sean Slade and Paul Q. Kolderie mixed it.

acoustic, on cd2

An acoustic version, recorded live at the Eve's Club, went out as the third track on the second CD of the “Fake Plastic Trees” single on 15 May 1995, next to acoustic takes of the title song and “Street Spirit (Fade Out)”. Without the two guitarists' noises over it, it turns into a plain ballad. Sean McCarthy, in PopMatters' thirtieth-anniversary series, called it, in a live setting, the nearest thing the band have written to a campfire song.

in the set, then now and then

Once the album was out it went into the set properly, 66 nights in 1995 alone, and it held its place through the OK Computer tour. After 1998 it turned up only now and then. Makuhari Messe in Chiba on 18 April 2004 began a silence of 1,478 days, and it ended when the In Rainbows tour of North America opened at the Cruzan Amphitheatre in West Palm Beach on 5 May 2008, twelfth in a set of 24. The latest of its nights is Tokyo on 8 October 2008.

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 one of the songs 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, and counted it among Yorke's own favourites.