(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Sat 8 November 2025 11:51, UK
After years of playing together as school friends, On A Friday signed to EMI, who suggested that the Oxford five-piece change their name. Soon after, they were Radiohead, lifting their name from the tracklisting of Talking Heads’ True Stories. Unfortunately, the band had a tough start when their debut single, ‘Creep’, was blacklisted by the BBC for being “too depressing”.
Although ‘Creep’ eventually received attention overseas, finding success on MTV in the United States, their debut album, Pablo Honey, failed to make much of an impact. Nevertheless, Radiohead took to the studio with John Leckie and started working on their second record, which resulted in The Bends.
There’s plenty of grungey angst on this album, but it was The Bends when Radiohead really set themselves apart from the rest of the growing alternative rock scene. While those bands tended to focus on the banality of life and the brutality of having to live under such circumstances, the Oxfordshire band did it all with an educated flourish that made other groups look like soapbox screamers and Radiohead as professors.
‘Fake Plastic Trees’ may well be one of the band’s best songs, and its place on this record is cherished by all. Equally, ‘Bones’ and ‘Street Spirit’ may well be other songs to challenge the top of the Radiohead pile. But the real beauty of this record is not the songs but how they’re delivered.
Grunge had been largely about turning up the volume and smashing guitars. On The Bends, Radiohead are more intent on what they can use their guitars to achieve. They’re still just as angry, but they’re not resorting to low blows.
Thom Yorke in 1997. (Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
During the album’s creation, tensions were high, and a rigorous touring schedule had exhausted the band, particularly lead vocalist Thom Yorke. He told NME: “I’m fucking ill and physically I’m completely fucked and mentally I’ve had enough.” However, the recording of The Bends ended up being a turning point for the band, who discovered new methods of working and experimenting.
According to Ed O’Brien: “We were very aware of something on The Bends that we weren’t aware of on Pablo Honey… If it sounded really great with Thom playing acoustic with Phil and [bassist Colin Greenwood], what was the point in trying to add something more?”
The Bends spawned multiple chart successes, such as ‘High and Dry’, ‘Street Spirit (Fade Out)’, ‘Just’ and ‘Fake Plastic Trees’. The latter, which ended up soundtracking 1995’s Clueless, a film in which protagonist Cher refers to the track as “crybaby music”, hit number 20 on the UK Singles Chart. Despite the song’s success, Yorke revealed that its origins were much bleaker.
He explained that the song was actually “the product of a joke that wasn’t really a joke, a very lonely, drunken evening and, well, a breakdown of sorts.” Yorke described the song as stemming from “a very nice melody that I had absolutely no idea what to do with,” although the introduction of strings remedied his uncertainty.
Leckie recalled: “They had decided to use string players for ‘(Nice Dream)’, so I suggested that if we were having them in anyway, it made sense to use them for two or three tracks. So the night before the string players arrived, Thom went into the studio – under duress, really – and recorded a take of ‘Fake Plastic Trees.’”
Yorke elucidated: “That was one of the worst days for me. I spent the first five or six hours at the studio just throwing a wobbly. I shouted at everyone, and then John Leckie sent everybody else away. He sat me down, and I did a guide vocal on ‘Fake Plastic Trees.’” However, after “Thom played it in three takes,” according to guitarist Jonny Greenwood, “he burst into tears”.
Revisit the emotional track below, which is certainly a highlight of The Bends.
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