Sulk

hungerford

On 19 August 1987 Michael Ryan, twenty-seven, shot and killed sixteen people in and around the Berkshire town of Hungerford, his mother and an unarmed police officer among them, and then killed himself. No motive was ever established. Yorke wrote a song in response. The 2003 page counts it among his earliest; Far Out dates the first draft to the late 1980s.

a single contender

It survived long enough to be tried for the big job. At RAK in early 1994 EMI wanted a follow-up to “Creep” before anything else, and the band worked up four candidates one after another: “Sulk”, “The Bends”, “(Nice Dream)” and “Just”. Mac Randall, in Guitar World, says none of them felt right, and the hunt slowed the sessions to a crawl.

The song came right in the summer. After a tour in May and June the band spent two weeks at the Manor in Oxfordshire in July, and completed “Sulk” there along with “Bones” and “The Bends”; Randall says songs that had caused no end of trouble earlier in the year went down with a minimum of fuss. It was mixed, like most of the album, by Sean Slade and Paul Q. Kolderie.

the last line

Kurt Cobain died on or around 5 April 1994. The song as Yorke wrote it closed on a line about shooting a gun, and when it came to recording it that line went. He did not want anyone hearing it as a comment on Cobain's death, when the song had been about something else entirely. What is left ends on the chorus: someone who sulks and burns, a blessing for their soul, love arriving too late, and the flat verdict that they are like their father and will not change.

Its first outing in the archive predates all of this. The Royal Berks Hospital Social Club in Reading, 21 February 1994, six weeks before Cobain died, on the same night as the first “Bones”.

how soon is now

J.C. Macek, writing for PopMatters' thirtieth-anniversary series, heard the electronic drone under the opening as something close to the one under the Smiths' “How Soon Is Now?”, and Morrissey in Yorke's wail. Calm arpeggios carry the verses. The second chorus tips into a wild guitar solo, and after the fade the noise from the start comes back for a short coda of its own, a false ending before “Street Spirit (Fade Out)”.

thirteen nights

It barely lived on stage. After Reading it was not played again for 284 days, until the Melkweg in Amsterdam on 2 December 1994. Eleven nights in 1995, the last at the Town and Country Club in Leeds on 1 November 1995. Thirteen nights in all, never the opener and never the closer.

It has not been played since. In 2020 Rolling Stone noted that every other song on The Bends bar “High and Dry” had turned up in a set at some point after 2000.