The “mixed up” Radiohead song Thom Yorke thought was beyond bad
The five members of Radiohead coagulated in the obscure corridors of Abingdon School, Oxfordshire, an establishment noted by its distinguished alumni, and an oppressive, Dickensian atmosphere.
The comedy actor David Mitchell is among the school’s other misfits that somehow found themselves spat out on the cutting edge of the arts. And it is with a noted degree of irony that the Peep Show star offers a rare insight into how that curious upbringing may well have informed the hallowed sound of Britain’s favourite sad band.
During Mitchell’s Desert Island Discs episode on BBC Radio 4 in 2009, he picked out Radiohead’s blockbusting debut single, ‘Creep’, as one of the tracks he would take to the desert island. Introducing it, Mitchell said ‘Creep’ was “a brilliant song, but the words are so depressing, and I like to think of it as our school song.”
Offering an origin story that others aren’t privvy to, he continued, “I would like one day, as a stunt, to arrange for all of the pupils in Abingdon School to stand up in chapel and sing an organ arrangement of this song.” However, it remains unclear whether Thom Yorke and his old classmates would see the funny side.
Following a seismic reaction to ‘Creep’, Radiohead regrouped for their second album, The Bends, largely dismissing their debut. Released in 1995, the album came as the group’s first refined and well-balanced offering with a bounty of hit singles and slower, moody tracks brimming with ‘Creep’ DNA sans the melodrama that Yorke came to loathe.
The record helped Radiohead migrate from their status as a sneering one-hit-wonder to become one of the most important British bands of the moment, alongside Oasis and Blur during their famed Britpop battle. Among its tracks were grunge anthems like ‘Black Star’ and ‘Just’ alongside more subdued, melancholy songs like ‘Street Spirit (Fade Out)’.
While the band progressed impressively from this sound through 1997’s OK Computer and flirted thereafter with jazz and electro influences in Kid A and Amnesiac, The Bends still holds a special place in their hearts. This can’t, however, apply to all of its tracks; I’m afraid the entry-level favourite ‘High and Dry’ was never quite to frontman Yorke’s picky taste.
‘High and Dry’ was originally recorded in 1993 during the Pablo Honey sessions, and while it didn’t make the cut for the debut, Yorke allowed the remastered track to appear on The Bends with much reluctance. It’s a move that he has sorely regretted ever since, wishing he had left it on the ash heap.
The catchy guitar rhythm and soaring chorus vocals in ‘High and Dry’ have racked up over half a billion streams on Spotify to date, but popularity doesn’t always reflect quality. Yorke reflected on the track while speaking to Billboard in 1996, revealing that the lyrics were about “some loony girl I was going out with” but became “mixed up with ideas about success and failure”.
In his view, this naively gave the song a muddled tone, lingering somewhere between the commercial alt-pop of Pablo Honey and the more profound leanings that followed. That’s an awkward middle-ground that Yorke and his bandmates also clearly hated, with the song largely retired from live performance.
He later asserted that the track is “not bad… it’s very bad”. And the group even went so far as to dismiss it as “too Rod Stewart”. That’s about as harsh as criticism no doubt gets in their eyes.
