Fake Plastic Trees

a joke that wasn't a joke

Yorke has described where it came from without dressing it up: “the product of a joke that wasn't really a joke, a very lonely, drunken evening and, well, a breakdown of sorts”. The melody arrived first and he had no idea what to do with it, so he let the words come as they came.

I just recorded whatever was going on in my head… I wrote those words and laughed. I thought they were really funny, especially that bit about polystyrene.

thom yorke

rak, and the wrong arrangement

They recorded it at RAK with John Leckie during The Bends sessions, under pressure from EMI to produce another “Creep”. The arrangement would not come. Ed O'Brien's verdict on one attempt was that it sounded like “November Rain”: “pompous and bombastic… just the worst”.

Then the band went to see Jeff Buckley at the Garage in London. Leckie's account of what that did: “It made [Thom] realise you could sing in a falsetto without sounding dripping.”

Yorke went back and recorded it alone on acoustic guitar. By Colin Greenwood's telling he played three takes and then burst into tears. He did not want to use them, thinking them too vulnerable, and the rest of the band talked him into it. Everything else on the record, including Jonny Greenwood's Hammond organ, was overdubbed onto that performance across the following days, which left the drummer with a problem.

Part of the beauty was the way it would actually slip in and out, but trying to follow it was a nightmare.

philip selway

released

Parlophone released it in May 1995, the third single from The Bends in Britain and the first in America. It reached the top 50 in the UK, New Zealand, on the US Modern Rock Tracks chart and on the Canadian rock chart, and it spread further when it turned up in Clueless. An acoustic version and a shorter edit went out across the single's various configurations.

Rolling Stone later placed it at 385 in its 500 greatest songs. Pitchfork traced a straight line from it to Coldplay and Travis, which is either a compliment or not.

the one they end on

It was in the set from 21 February 1994 in Reading, before the album existed, and it was played 111 times in 1995, more than any other song that year. The archive counts 415 nights, thirty-three of which it closed.