“We were bashing our heads”: the Radiohead song Thom Yorke called a nightmare to work on
Compared to every other band, Radiohead comes off like they make experiments instead of actual songs. Looking through their discography, every one of their best moments comes when they start to fly off the handle and see where their sound takes them rather than trying to repeat what they thought had worked in the past. Although they had a lot of work to do to outrun the sound of Pablo Honey, Thom Yorke remembered having to put in a lot of leg work to get this song anywhere close to finished.
Then again, there was nothing inherently wrong with what the band were doing on their debut. They had all the trappings of what an alternative band should sound like, but the minute that people heard tunes like ‘Anyone Can Play Guitar’, it was clear that they could get that same sound out of virtually anyone coming out of the Seattle scene around the same time.
So, on The Bends, it felt like they all made a conscious effort to take every new direction they could get their hands on. There was still the odd great radio single like ‘High and Dry’ or ‘Fake Plastic Trees’, but looking back on how they made tunes like ‘Nice Dream’ or ‘Just’, they seemed much more concerned with making something that was deliberately strange rather than catering to their label’s mainstream appeal.
Even when they did make radio singles, how would you categorise something like ‘Black Star’? Yes, there are pieces of Britpop grandeur in it, but the Gallagher brothers would have never made something this kooky, and even when they hit ‘Street Spirit (Fade Out)’, that kind of melancholy was far from everyone’s first choice for a single.
While there are pieces of it that sound like they could have come off a later REM project, most of ‘Street Spirit’ comes down to that clinical picking pattern. Since the whole song is about fading out of the world and flying off like dust in the wind, having that picking part anchoring everything is one of the only pieces that actually puts the listener back on stable ground for the whole tune.
Despite keeping things simple, though, Yorke remembered the misery of trying to get the tune down on tape, saying, “I like the fact that The Bends was so direct, but it [required] a lot of aborted sessions and starting over. For ‘Street Spirit [Fade Out]’, we were bashing our heads against the wall for days and not getting anywhere. We had countless versions that didn’t make sense. I was being impatient.”
Looking at what they ended up with, the less-is-more approach that the tune comes off as is practically a magic act for them. The whole point of the tune is to be fairly standard, but listening back to when the strings come in and how Yorke’s vocal performance grows on every tune, there are many more moving parts involved than getting the guitar recorded with no mistakes.
Not only did this end The Bends on a solid note, but it also signalled where the group would be going next. That melancholy may have coated their older tunes, but by the time OK Computer blew up, they took that same attitude and amplified it as high as they possibly could.
