The Bends

the benz

It is one of the oldest songs they have. Yorke wrote it before Pablo Honey was recorded, under the title “The Benz”, and it went straight into the live set: Radiohead were playing it in 1992 and 1993, long before anyone could buy it. Colin Greenwood called it “a perennial hardy annual of a live favourite, faithfully committed live to tape”.

A 4-track demo exists from the Pablo Honey sessions. Yorke played it to Paul Kolderie at the end of those sessions and then decided to keep it back for the next record. In March 1993 they cut another demo at Courtyard Studios with their live engineer Jim Warren, in the same session that produced “High and Dry”, and sent that to John Leckie.

rak, then the manor

Leckie recorded it at RAK in London between February and May 1994. That version never came out: he thought the guitars too loud and the whole thing “overblown”, with Yorke's vocal closer to a scream, and the band disagreed. They re-cut it at the Manor in Oxfordshire in July.

The version on the record is the first take at the Manor.

I wanted to get away from the studio to view a house for rent. Consequently, this was the first take.

philip selway

Q later reported it took several takes. Either way, the intro problem remained: it was too bombastic. The fix was already on a cassette. On the first American tour Yorke had held a recorder out of a hotel window.

There was this guy training these eight-year-old kids, who were parading up and down with all these different instruments. The guy had this little microphone on his sweater and was going: ‘Yeah, keep it up, keep it up.’ So I ran out and taped it.

thom yorke · vox, april 1995

That marching band is the tinkling you hear before the guitars arrive.

five sections

In E minor at 90 beats per minute, and structurally the most complicated thing on the album: five distinct sections, built on the loud-quiet-loud dynamic the Pixies made ordinary. The opening chords are played in unison by all three guitarists. In the second verse Jonny Greenwood slips in a counter-melody with a minor third in it that points at “How Soon Is Now?”, and there is a multi-tracked recorder buried low in the mix. Ed O'Brien described Greenwood's playing on it as “abusive”. Adam Sweeting in the Guardian called the song “a powerchord masterclass”.

completely taking the piss

The title is decompression sickness: what happens to a diver who surfaces too quickly. Since it arrived just as “Creep” was making the band famous, it was read as a complaint about that, and Yorke has spent thirty years saying the joke was missed.

[‘The Bends’] is one of those songs I was rambling around and just poured all this rubbish out into the song. Then it all started happening, which was a bit odd. I was completely taking the piss when I wrote it. Then the joke started wearing a bit thin.

thom yorke · 120 minutes, 10 april 1995

He called it a “Bowie pastiche”, meant “I wish it was the Sixties / I wish I could be happy” as a gag, and was then asked in interview after interview whether he really wished it was the Sixties. By 1996 he was aiming the line squarely at the journalists who could not stop writing about that decade, and at the bands feeding them. Asked about Britpop he said even Oasis were “nothing more than the result of a laborious and constant reshuffling of everything that has been done from the Sixties to today”.

Underneath the joke the song is about something plainer. Yorke said it was about knowing who your friends are.

released twice, sort of

The first version anyone could buy was live: “The Benz”, recorded for the French radio show Black Sessions on 23 February 1993 and tucked onto the French pressing of “Creep”. The studio version came out as track two of The Bends on 8 March 1995.

Parlophone eventually put it out as a single, but only in Ireland, on 26 July 1996, a limited run of 2,000 copies backed with live versions of “My Iron Lung” and “Bones” from the London Forum. It reached number 26 on the Irish chart and lasted one week there. Stanley Donwood and Yorke drew the inhaler on the sleeve, Yorke credited as “The White Chocolate Farm”.

The original 4-track demo surfaced in 1997 on Long Live Tibet, a Tibet House Trust charity record alongside Bowie, Björk, Pulp and Blur: slower, lo-fi, louder guitars at the front, the recorder much more audible, the vocal flat.

one of the most played

It was the first song from the album they ever played live, years ahead of it. Tel Aviv in April 1993, Chicago that June, the Garage in London that September; the Astoria in May 1994 and Glastonbury that June; Later… with Jools Holland in May 1995, a performance the Telegraph later ranked sixth-best in the show's history. It stayed through the OK Computer, Kid A, Amnesiac, Hail to the Thief and In Rainbows tours, then went quiet for six years until it came back on the road for A Moon Shaped Pool.

The archive has it at 394 nights, 88 of them in 1995 alone, opening the show 81 times.

what people made of it

Hot Press called it “roaring, soaring and tormented” in 1995. The Chicago Tribune thought it and “Black Star” could have been catchy little rockers if the band had dropped the grandiose effects. Billboard, twenty years on: “For the first 45 seconds, this could be an Oasis track. Then the vocals come in, and Yorke's piss-take on jaded rock-star behavior reveals a searing intelligence.” NME put Jonny Greenwood's solo seventh in its fifty greatest, Uncut ranked the song third-greatest Radiohead song in 2017. Anthrax covered it as a B-side in 1998, their drummer explaining the choice: “Radiohead are like the Pink Floyd of this era.”