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 being the thing that keeps a patient breathing and will not let them leave. Thom Yorke started it in August 1993, on the morning Radiohead pulled out of the Reading Festival because his voice had gone, and finished it in America. The title came from a photograph he had kept for six months, of a child in a 1950s iron lung. The 2003 version of this site says he was very proud of the words, and felt he had caught exactly what he was writing about.

the astoria

They tried recording it at RAK with John Leckie and were not happy with any of it. The version that was released comes from the band's show at the London Astoria on 27 May 1994, which MTV Europe filmed and Leckie was at, with Yorke's vocal sung again over it and the crowd taken out. Mac Randall, in Exit Music, hears a jangly opening hook and a verse melody he calls McCartney-esque, until the bridge, where the guitars detonate. Of everything on the My Iron Lung EP, it is the only song that went on to The Bends.

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. In America Capitol did not chase airplay for it. Perry Watts-Russell, the label's vice president of A&R, told Billboard it was only ever meant for the fans and was not a proper first single. Mac Randall, in Exit Music, argues that it bought the band credibility, which The Bends could then cash in.

the royal festival hall

It was first played in Reading on 21 February 1994, seven months before the single, and for the next three years it was a regular way to start a show; nearly all of the forty-nine nights it opened fall between 1994 and 1996. By the autumn of 2000 it had moved to the other end of the night, closing the second encore at Werchter, Nijmegen and Kildare. After its longest absence it came back in Amsterdam on 20 May 2016, and the archive has it on 432 nights, the latest in Toronto on 20 July 2018.

Scott Walker invited the band to play his Meltdown festival at the Royal Festival Hall in London on 1 July 2000, the one British date of that summer and their first concert at home since November 1997. Ten of the 22 songs were unreleased, and there was nothing from Pablo Honey. Halfway through “My Iron Lung” the song fell apart, and Yorke, laughing, brought it back in on his own.