High and Dry

exeter

Yorke had it before Radiohead did. At the University of Exeter he played in a short-lived band called Headless Chickens, and footage of him singing an early “High and Dry” with them, shot at the university's Lemon Grove, surfaced online in July 2015. He told Billboard in 1996 where the words came from.

As far as I can remember, the words were originally about some loony girl

thom yorke · billboard, 17 february 1996

After a while, he said, they got tangled up with ideas about success and failure. The verses are addressed to someone performing stunts for attention, a motorcycle, a drop, a promise to never stop, who is turning into someone he is not; the chorus asks not to be left stranded.

courtyard

The recording on The Bends is older than the rest of the album by almost a year. Radiohead made it in 1993, around the Pablo Honey period, at Courtyard Studios just outside Oxford, with their live sound engineer Jim Warren behind the desk.

The 2003 page tells how it came together. It began over a Soul II Soul rhythm the band had lifted. Phil Selway had a new skin on his bass drum and was messing about with it, which is where the beat came from. Yorke played the opening on acoustic guitar for a laugh, and everyone agreed it sounded like Rod Stewart. Unusually for them the parts were not played together: each member came in and recorded his own, and the pieces were assembled afterwards. Then they shelved it.

The whole song rests on one chord progression, F sharp minor, A, E, going round. Ben Morss, taking it apart for PopMatters' thirtieth-anniversary series, showed how the verse melody keeps skipping one note of the scale and lets the chords supply it, so that every line lands and pushes on at once.

back out of the drawer

During the tense sessions for The Bends, someone found the tape again. Yorke told Billboard they had written it off as rubbish, too Rod Stewart, but that coming back to it one day it felt like a mirror of everything they had been through since “Creep”. They were surprised how well it sat with the new songs and did not re-record it. The album version is the 1993 demo, remixed, by Sean Slade and Paul Q. Kolderie. On the liner notes it is the one track John Leckie did not produce; the credit goes to Jim Warren and the band.

the single

It went out on 27 February 1995 as a double A-side with “Planet Telex”. CD1 led with “High and Dry” and added “Maquiladora” and the Hexidecimal Mix of “Planet Telex”; CD2 led with “Planet Telex” and carried “Killer Cars”. It reached 17 in the UK, 21 in Scotland, 22 in New Zealand and 31 in Canada. Smash Hits gave it four out of five and compared it to Suede, with less moaning.

In America it was Capitol's second single from the album, after “Fake Plastic Trees”. In Billboard's issue of 17 February 1996 it stood at 20 on Modern Rock Tracks after nine weeks on the chart. It peaked at 18 there and at 78 on the Hot 100.

There were two videos. David Mould filmed the band at Vasquez Rocks outside Los Angeles. For the American release Capitol commissioned a second from Paul Cunningham, set in a roadside diner and modelled on Pulp Fiction; MTV asked for a shot of an exploding car to be cut.

arm twisted

Yorke turned on it early. In 2006 he told Pitchfork that if the label had ever pressured him over a song, it was this one, and that he had his arm twisted to put it anywhere at all.

It's not bad, you know. It's not bad...it's very bad.

thom yorke · pitchfork, 16 august 2006

Other people heard a template in it. Pitchfork in 2017 credited it and “Fake Plastic Trees” with anticipating the smoothed-down post-Britpop of Coldplay and Travis, and Ed Power in the Irish Times went further, saying it had invented Coldplay while Chris Martin was still at university. Which may be part of the problem.

one hundred and sixty nights

First played at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid on 5 May 1994, the same night as “Planet Telex”. In 1995 it was played 102 times, and Yorke took it solo and acoustic to the Horseshoe Tavern in Toronto on 28 March 1995, a set the band dug out of a VHS tape for the album's thirtieth anniversary. On stage he liked to dedicate it to the older people in the room who did not care for loud music.

Thirty-one nights in 1996, twenty-one in 1997, and then one last one at Crossing Hall in Fukuoka on 21 January 1998. It has not been played since. A hundred and sixty nights, ten of them as the closer.