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Radiohead’s The Bends at 30: this fraught, compassionate, violently disturbed record remains one of their best
There was a time in the early to mid-2000s when naming The Bends as your favourite Radiohead album was like opting for chicken korma from the takeaway menu, while the gourmands decided between the bangla shatkora and jhinga bahar.
Thirty years after its release, and with such musical snobbery now thankfully consigned to the past, the fraught, compassionate, violently disturbed rock of The Bends is now appreciated as one of the choice cuts on Radiohead’s album menu. It’s even regarded by some fans as the band’s crowning moment.
The Bends didn’t get off to a good start. The combined pressure to repeat the commercial success of the hit song Creep and rigorous touring schedule led exhausted lead singer-songwriter Thom Yorke to tell an NME interviewer in 1993: “I’m fucking ill and physically I’m completely fucked and mentally I’ve had enough.”
Things didn’t get better when, upon entering London’s Rak Studios in early 1994 to record new material, the band were informed by label EMI that they only had nine weeks to come up with a new album. It was a period Yorke later described as “a total fucking meltdown for two fucking months”.
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The angst, though, unlocked something in Yorke. Under the stewardship of experienced producer John Leckie, the songs poured out of him.
From OK Computer (1997) onwards, a political streak permeated Radiohead’s work. But on The Bends, Yorke’s mental state inspired songs which satisfied themselves with exploring the inherent fallibility of humans. Albeit in a way which was just as bleak, despairing, and hopeless as some of their later, more politically charged material.
In the world of The Bends, everything and everyone is “broken” (Planet Telex), there are “pieces missing everywhere” (Bones), we are scratching “an eternal itch” (My Iron Lung) and, what really hurts, the ever-emotive Yorke informs us, is that we’ve done all this “to ourselves” (Just).
On the rare occasions where it seems like there is light at the end of the proverbial tunnel (the prospect of the “the best thing that you’ve ever had” on High and Dry), Yorke is there to snatch it away again (“the best thing you’ve had has gone away”).
High and Dry by Radiohead from The Bends (1995).
Even the instruction to “immerse your soul in love” on Street Spirit (Fade Out) seems more like a threat than something romantic, given the preceding lines “dead birds scream as they fight for life / I can feel death, can see its beady eyes”.
This might seem like I’m couching this as a negative. But for those of us who are into our misery music, The Bends is a beautiful place to wallow.
No hiding place
For all the brilliance of OK Computer, it heralded the beginning of a series of Radiohead albums where experimentation in production was deemed as important as the songwriting. And in the case of the stubbornly anti-melodic Kid A and Amnesiac, perhaps even more so.
To describe the sound of The Bends as simplistic would be an insult to the band and Leckie. But it does, perhaps, represent the last time in the Radiohead’s recording career where the songwriting was their main focus.
In a Quietus article celebrating the album’s 25th anniversary, music critic Wyndham Wallace noted that “the sonics of the album were polished, yet rarely drew attention to themselves … Yorke’s voice seemed to be inhabiting the songs rather than testing out a role” .
Performing Just from The Bends on MTV in 1995.
Indeed, The Bends is big, contemporary, and has all the dynamic range and nuance we’d desire across an album to keep it interesting. But the production played a supporting role to the songs, rather than serving as the main character.
As such, there was no hiding place for the likes of later songs Fitter, Happier, The National Anthem, or Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors, with their distinct lack of lead vocal melody lines.
The Bends remains an outlier in Radiohead’s catalogue, being the only album that delivers a combination of the anthemic choruses (Sulk, Just and Bones) with the gentle melodic beauty of Fake Plastic Trees, (Nice Dream), Bullet Proof … I Wish I Was and the brooding intensity of Street Spirit (Fade Out) – all while being memorable after one or two listens.
After all, what’s wrong with chicken korma anyway? Sometimes, it’s exactly what you want. Läs mer…