Fake Plastic Trees

a joke that wasn't a joke

Thom Yorke has described where it came from without dressing it up. In Johnny Black's history of the song for Blender in 2003 he calls it “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. He laughed when he wrote them, he said later, and thought them funny, the bit about polystyrene most of all.

rak, and the wrong arrangement

They recorded it at RAK with John Leckie during the sessions for The Bends, with EMI waiting for another “Creep”, and the arrangement would not come. Ed O'Brien said one attempt sounded like Guns N' Roses' “November Rain”, “pompous and bombastic… just the worst”.

Then the band went to see Jeff Buckley at the Garage in London, which, Leckie said, “made [Thom] realise you could sing in a falsetto without sounding dripping”. Yorke went back and recorded it alone on acoustic guitar. In Colin Greenwood's telling he played three takes and then burst into tears, and did not want them used, thinking them too vulnerable, until the rest of the band talked him round. Everything else on the record, Jonny Greenwood's Hammond organ among it, 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.

phil selway · modern drummer, august 1996

Paul Kolderie, mixing it with Sean Slade, missed a cue and brought the electric guitars in late, and the band kept it that way. Capitol, the band's American label, pressed for a different mix by Bob Clearmountain, and Yorke refused it; a quote of his on the 2003 version of this site has the ghostly keyboards and strange strings cut out of it as if with a razor blade.

the single

Parlophone released it in May 1995, the third single from The Bends in Britain, where it reached number 20. In America, where the response to the album had been that it had no “Creep” on it, Capitol made it the first single to show there was more to the band, and it spread further when it turned up in Clueless.

Jake Scott made the video in an aircraft hangar in Los Angeles, with Yorke pushed round a supermarket in a trolley. It was expensive, and Yorke told WHFS in 1996 that the band were uneasy about it.

koko

It was in the set from the Royal Berks Hospital Social Club in Reading on 21 February 1994, before the album existed, and at the London Astoria on 27 May that year Yorke introduced it as a song about Canary Wharf. In 1995 the band played it on 113 nights, and of the 34 gigs it has closed, more fell that year than in any other.

At KOKO in Camden on 1 May 2006, a Friends of the Earth benefit with only Yorke and Jonny on stage, they played it fourth, and Jonny's guitar got so wild that Yorke broke off laughing mid-line and they stopped short of the end. David Cameron, leader of the Conservatives, was watching from the VIP area, and later that month he told Desert Island Discs that they had played it because he asked, in a postscript to his letter. A Radiohead spokesman told The Independent that the songs were what the two of them wanted to play.

out of respect

Alanis Morissette had been playing it on her American tour. When Radiohead joined that tour in the summer of 1996, O'Brien remembered, she dropped it out of respect.