Considering what a fully-formed masterpiece it turned out to be, it’s ironic to think of the piecemeal creation of The Bends, an album that was made bit by bit over the course of a year. Radiohead’s second record turns 30 this month and it still sounds as startling as it did upon release in March 1995, an inventive and vital release that established the Oxford five-piece as one of the world’s most forward-thinking, dynamically talented guitar bands. But there was a time when Thom Yorke, brothers Jonny and Colin Greenwood, Ed O’Brien and Phil Selway wondered if they’d get there. The creation of The Bends was one of fits and starts, doubts and uncertainty.
There was pressure coming from every angle. They’d had a huge worldwide hit with their moping classic Creep, the success of which masked a below-par debut album in 1993’s Pablo Honey. “If we hadn’t had that success with Creep,” bassist Colin Greenwood told this writer last year, “we wouldn’t have made The Bends and we would have been dropped by EMI. Isn’t that crazy?”
But despite enabling them to make a follow-up, Creep’s success had become a millstone around their neck, one of those massive songs that makes people forget you’ve got any others. Radiohead wanted to prove they were no one-hit wonders. Their label wanted them to write more hit singles. Both roughly similar aims, you could say, but the two parties had wildly different ideas about how to get there and Radiohead weren’t yet in the position to do things their way.
Yorke has always been the group’s chief creative officer and it wasn’t like he short of material, writing a shedload of songs during the band’s draining, extensive touring to support Pablo Honey. Getting them down on tape, though, was a different matter, especially as their record label had requested they record any potential singles first and do the album tracks after. As anyone who has immersed themselves in The Bends ever since knows, it just wasn’t that sort of album.
They gave it a go, though, entering London’s RAK Studios in February 1994 with Stone Roses producer John Leckie (chosen for his work with Magazine rather than Ian Brown & co.) to begin work. It was an arduous process.
"The Bends, for me, will be tainted by a particular picture I have of a very bad time,” Yorke told Time Out’s Pete Paphides. “Sitting in the studio, thinking, ‘No, I don’t think we can pull this together. We’re just going to have to split up’. Thinking, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore’ in big letters, then in smaller letters, ‘And I’m gonna go and buy a car and drive away and I’m not coming back’. I’m sure everyone in the band was going through that.”
“It was horrible," guitarist O’Brien explained to NME’s Ted Kessler. "We were questioning everything too much, questioning the fundamentals of what we were doing. It was horrible, but I think that's the problem with a university education. You just end up thinking too much."
Experienced hand Leckie was crucial in helping them overcome the hurdles. “He was so cool - he was amazingly able to deal with all sorts of stuff,” recalled Yorke. “He was getting "concerned but polite" phone cells from the record company and had to deal with that. We wouldn't take calls from them but, because of his vast experience in the studio, he viewed everything with a lack of importance. And thank God he did! He's been doing it for so long he realised sometimes a producer is simply someone who just creates the right atmosphere for things to happen. In a way, he was like a caring uncle.”
With the label backing away from their idea to get the singles down first, they began to gain some momentum. "The thing John Leckie used to say all the time was, 'Do what the fuck you like'," explained Yorke. "And nobody had ever said it before in that way. It was like being at art college: in the first year they said, 'You can do whatever you want'. So l spent a year wandering around saying, 'I don't want to do any of this, actually'. Then by the second year I'd got into computers. I just needed something to start me off, and I was alright after that because I'd found a medium in which to work — and it was the same with recording.”
Recorded in spurts between more bouts of touring, The Bends owes its eventual sound to both the thrilling live band they’d become and, encouraged by Leckie, adventurous experimentation in the studio. Slowly, definitive versions of songs that would make up the core of the record were laid down: the urgent art-rock of Just, (Nice Dream)’s gently psychedelic grooves, the gloriously futuristic jolt of Planet Telex, which would become the album’s opener. High And Dry, a song they’d forgotten about, would be resurrected after they came across an old demo.
If there was one track that showed Radiohead were now operating on a whole new level, it was closer Street Spirit (Fade Out). On one hand, it’s a mournful ballad, but on the other, no it’s not, how dare you say that? It’s a bewitching spaghetti junction of arpeggio guitar parts, gentle rhythmic propulsion and quietly powerful vocals, a song that sounds like it’s slowing the world down. For Yorke, capturing it was a moment he’ll never forget.
“The whole reason to be doing this is to arrive at those moments,” he told Mojo’s Nick Kent. “It makes it worth all the scratching around for months on end in note-books and all the hundreds of thousands of ideas you compile on endless tapes. It's the sole reason you spend your entire life in your bedroom playing to yourself. If I ever forget why I started this as a career, than that's why I started. We spent a day going round in circles until I was thinking, ‘This is never going to happen’. Then suddenly something happened and I was transported to a place that I'd been willing myself to be in for months on end. I'd finally made the transition. Now you might only be in that place for three minutes and for ever more life will never be quite as good. But that's fine by me.”
The importance of capturing a moment of live wizardry in shaping The Bends can be summed up in two other songs, both at the opposite end of the record’s sonic spectrum. Yorke had struggled with the vocals on Fake Plastic Trees, a swaying acoustic anthem, until going to a Jeff Buckley show inspired him. He immediately went back to the studio and nailed it in three takes. The group had struggled to nail the caged ferocity of wiry rocker My Iron Lung, until they performed it for a filmed gig at London’s Astoria and realised they could that version. It was perfect. Yorke overdubbed new vocals in the studio with the rest taken from the show.
It was a hit in the UK, going into the Top Five in the Album Charts and whilst the rest of the world was a little slow in recognising The Bends as a modern classic, everyone eventually got up to speed. Their cause was undoubtedly helped by a worldwide support tour with R.E.M., who proclaimed their genius in interviews, but there was no way this wasn’t going to happen. The Bends was the work of a generational guitar band coming of age. It was going to cut through however it unfolded.
In an interview around release, Yorke was finally freed of the year-long tension he’d experienced making the album. “The mood in the band at the moment is better than it’s ever been,” he beamed. “It’s taken us this long to realise that it’s as simple as getting together with your mates and playing some songs. Everything else is bullshit.”
Unfortunately, Yorke and his bandmates seem to have forgotten this on every album they’ve made since. Radiohead’s way is always the hard way. They’re the band whose classics are all about working your way through the bad times. As The Bends proved, it’s always worth it in the end.
