It’s funny to think now that Radiohead were once considered a one-hit wonder, given how long it’s been since Thom Yorke & co. seemed to have any concerns with having hits at all. Radiohead could be regarded as the ultimate modern example of a group as an “album band”, a reputation that was first forged when they didn’t release any singles from their 2000 fourth record Kid A. It didn’t seem to harm the cause, given it went to Number One in the UK and the US.
But just a few years before, the one-hit wonder tag borne from the worldwide success of their 1992 anthem Creep was still hanging over the Oxford quintet. There had been some indicators that Radiohead were not totally willing to go down the traditional route expected of guitar bands in the 90s, with their 1994 EP My Iron Lung the first signs that they were more inventive and trailblazing than anybody (perhaps themselves included) had yet realised.
The release of their era-defining second album The Bends in March 1995 would hammer home that point, a record melding forward-thinking art-rock and mesmeric yearning ballads. But still, the band played it safe when it came to the first single from the record, going with the melodic, mid-tempo acoustic-rock High & Dry. It was a double A-side with the more mind-blowing cut Planet Telex, but it was clear which song was going to get more airtime on radio playlists.
Listen to The Bends now, just a few months out from its 30th anniversary, and High & Dry does seem oddly out of place on the record, even sitting next to another lilting acoustic ballad, Fake Plastic Trees, on the album’s tracklisting. That’s because it wasn’t created with the batch of songs that the band penned for inclusion on their second record but written years before.
Frontman and chief songwriter Yorke had actually come up with the song whilst an early version of the group, then called On A Friday, were on hiatus because some of the members had gone to university. Yorke was down in the south-west of the UK, studying English and Fine Arts in Exeter, and this is where and when he wrote High & Dry. As you can see in the video at the end of this story, he went as far as performing it with Headless Chickens, the band he formed at uni, albeit a much-more rocky and up-tempo take on the track.
Radiohead was always Yorke’s creative alma mater, though, and they picked up where they left off when the scattered members returned to Oxford. High & Dry stuck around for a few years but wasn’t deemed worthy of inclusion on the band’s debut Pablo Honey. In March 1993, they recorded a demo of it with engineer Jim Warren but immediately discounted it. “We thought it was rubbish,” Yorke later explained to Billboard. “It was too Rod Stewart or something.”
But when they came upon that demo recording whilst making The Bends, the song made sense in a way that it hadn’t previously. “It seemed like a mirror showing us all the things we had been through,” recalled Yorke. “After Creep and the fatigue from all the touring, we were scared shitless really and people were interfering. We had to claim our collective freedom. That’ll never happen again. Now we have so much freedom, we barely know what to do with it.”
The song, Yorke said, was originally about “some loony girl I was going out with” but now the words meant something different. “After a while, they got all mixed up with ideas about success and failure,” he explained.
Perhaps that is the prism through which High & Dry needs to be viewed, a song that captures a sort of in-between version of Radiohead as they sought to go their own way but didn’t yet have the power to do it. They certainly seem to have a complicated relationship with it, even moreso than Creep, which has cropped up in their setlists now and then. According to Setlist.fm, High & Dry hasn’t been played live since January 1998.
“It reminded me of that song Mull Of Kintyre,” said guitarist Jonny Greenwood at the time, perhaps by way of explanation, “that really horrible kind of single, but in a nice way. It was one of those songs that people hopefully would be playing as soon as they learned guitar or something.”
You’d have to bet against Greenwood or any of his bandmates playing it if they return, as has been rumoured, for their first shows since 2018 this year. High & Dry has long been left in the past. Check out that very early performance of it by Thom Yorke with Headless Chickens below:
