Prove Yourself

the drill ep

Drill came out on Parlophone on 5 May 1992 with “Prove Yourself” at the front. Two of its four songs were taken from the Manic Hedgehog demo, but this and “Stupid Car” were new, recorded with their co-manager Chris Hufford at Courtyard Studios. Gary Davies played it on BBC Radio 1, the band's first national radio play in Britain. A DJ in Newcastle was playing it on hospital radio. It led their first Radio 1 session, on the Evening Session on 22 June.

Ian Gittins of Melody Maker caught them at the Powerhaus in Islington that month and thought it sounded like early Pixies on the record and like a heavy-duty Housemartins on stage.

They recorded it again, along with “You” and “Thinking About You”, for Pablo Honey.

the old gaol

Its first night in the archive is The Venue in Oxford on 1 March 1992, where it opened a four-song set. In all it opened five shows, was played 56 times in 1993, and the last of its 143 nights was Toronto on 12 December 1995.

One of those openers was a benefit for Rwanda at the Old Gaol in Abingdon on 23 September 1994, in the town where the band had met at school. Ian Watson, reviewing it for Melody Maker, found a crowd of mostly teenagers who roared when Thom Yorke told them every song was for Rwanda. The night raised £7,000, and afterwards the band sat talking with their parents.

better off dead

Yorke told Simon Williams of NME, the month Drill came out, that the song objects to things such as invasions of privacy, and that under the anger the outlook is positive, which is a lot to ask of a refrain about being better off dead. The next year he told the Los Angeles Times that it worked the way “Creep” did, as a study of a figure he had made up rather than a report on himself. Crowds took the refrain at its word, and the 2003 version of this site says the band were shocked to hear hundreds of kids singing the line about being better off dead, night after night.