My Iron Lung

the machine that breathes for you

EMI wanted another “Creep”. What they got was a song about what “Creep” had done to the band: an iron lung, the thing that keeps you breathing and will not let you leave.

They tried recording it at RAK and were not happy with any of it. The version that was released comes from a live performance at the London Astoria in May 1994, with Yorke's vocal re-recorded over it and the crowd taken out. Mac Randall described its shape: a jangly opening hook, a verse melody he called McCartney-esque, and then the bridge, where the guitars detonate.

Nigel Godrich and Stanley Donwood both came into the band's orbit around this time, and neither has left.

the single that was not meant to sell

It came out on 26 September 1994 in four different configurations, each with a different running order, and reached number 24. Capitol did not push it to American radio at all; their A&R vice president said plainly that it was meant for the fans rather than as the lead single for The Bends, and that its job was to buy the band credibility they could spend later.

The EP collected it with all the B-sides, and it is the only track from those sessions that made the album. Reviews at the time were mixed, though Billboard got there early: “brilliant, mind-bending rock… The sensitive intro is soon interrupted by a crash of loud and grating guitars, which rage in a seemingly random explosive roar.”

In 2020 the Guardian ranked it the tenth-best Radiohead song: it “uses catchy hooks and brawny riffs to rally against commercialisation. It risks sounding bratty, it is bratty, but from insolence [Radiohead] fashioned a new identity: stadium-rock agitators declaring war on hypocrisy and greed, particularly their own.”

four hundred and twenty-four nights

First played in Reading on 21 February 1994, ninety-six times in 1995, opening forty-eight shows and closing nineteen.