High and Dry

exeter

Thom 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.

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

thom yorke · billboard, 17 february 1996

By the time of that interview, he said, they had 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.

This site's 2003 lyrics page had the story of how it came together. It began over a Soul II Soul rhythm the band had lifted, and the beat came from Phil Selway messing about with a new skin on his bass drum. 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, the pieces were assembled afterwards, and then the tape went on the shelf. The whole song goes round on one chord sequence.

back out of the drawer

They forgot about it. In 1995 Jonny Greenwood told B-Side it had been demoed about 18 months before and that it was their manager who brought it back, though the band thought it weak. It reminded Greenwood of Wings' “Mull of Kintyre”, “that really horrible kind of single, but in a nice way”. 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, and Selway, writing in the band's fan-club booklet, took it as proof that a demo is often the best version a song gets. On the liner notes it is the one track John Leckie did not produce; the credit goes to Jim Warren and the band.

two singles, two videos

It went out on 27 February 1995 as a double A-side with “Planet Telex” and reached number 17. In America it was Capitol's second single from the album, after “Fake Plastic Trees”, and peaked at 18 on Billboard's Modern Rock Tracks and at 78 on the Hot 100.

David Mould filmed the first video at Vasquez Rocks outside Los Angeles, under a rain machine. Nobody on his crew knew the water could be warmed, and after three hours under it the band went down with flu. For America, Capitol commissioned a second, directed by Paul Cunningham, set in a roadside diner and modelled on Pulp Fiction, and MTV asked for a shot of an exploding car to be cut.

for the older people in the room

Its first night in this site's live archive is Cambridge on 3 October 1994. Its big year was 1995, with 103 nights. At the Forum in London that March, Andrew Mueller of Melody Maker noticed that “Creep” no longer stood out, and that the songs the crowd wanted were this and “The Bends”. Four days later Yorke took it solo and acoustic to the Horseshoe Tavern in Toronto, 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. It closed the show six times, and after Fukuoka on 21 January 1998 it was dropped.

a man with an acoustic guitar

By 2006 Yorke had turned on it. That year 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, 15 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.

Twenty years after Pitchfork, Harry Styles brought it up with Yorke as a classic. Yorke called it a man with an acoustic guitar singing.

That particular one I wish I hadn't [winces in pain], but there's nothing wrong with that.

thom yorke · rolling stone, 8 october 2026