Following the mild success of Pablo Honey Radiohead began to be referred to as “one-hit-wonders” after no other songs on their debut album proved to be major commercial successes on the charts. Thom Yorke and the boys returned to the studio and created their brit pop masterpiece The Bends, indelibly tattooing themselves into the fabric of British music forever more.
But it all might never have happened. The band was on the verge of breaking up after having a torrid time touring the United States. Radiohead felt as though they were stuck in a time warp, continually playing the same songs they had recorded two years previously. But in what would become asymptomatic of any good Radiohead music, the band used the tension to their advantage to craft The Bends, a reaction to what Thom Yorke called being “right at the end of the sexy, sassy, MTV eye-candy lifestyle.”
If you too were looking for some sort of repudiation to that type of lifestyle, The Bends provided an outlet for such frustration. It ran in stark contrast to the pop music culture of that time period, giving the music listener something starkly relatable and personal to connect to rather than simply digest.
The Bends often gets overlooked due to the album that it immediately preceded, OK Computer and the more popular Kid A. While no album can hold a candle to the work they did on OK Computer, without The Bends’ commercial success no studio in the world would have allowed Radiohead to be as adventurous as they were on OK Computer.
The actual music on the record is some of the finest pieces of instrumentation I have ever heard. And there is not a single song I find myself tempted to skip. The album starts with the casual ease of “Planet Telex” whose unconventional introduction was the first indicator that this was no Pablo Honey. The maturity in terms of production as well as overall quality is staggering when compared to Pablo Honey. If a friend of mine had played the two albums one after the other I would have said they were by two different artists.
Radiohead have a knack for writing songs that connect with the listener almost on contact. The track “Fake Plastic Trees” is one of the most beautiful songs I have ever heard. Thom’s soaring vocals combined with the instrumentation just exhausts one’s emotional psyche. The lyrics are some of the best Thom’s ever written and relate to one’s inability to be what a loved one wanted. “If I could be who you wanted / If I could be who you wanted all the time / All the time / All the time.” Perfect.
As always Thom gives us some consolation in being concerned about the negative side-effects of living in modern society. On the track “My Iron Lung” Thom tells us “And if you’re frightened / You can be frightened / You can be, it’s OK / And if you’re frightened / You can be frightened / You can be, it’s OK.”
The rest of the album is a mix of catarwauling guitar riffs, soaring vocals, and deeply personal songs that are reflective of the time period that birthed them. Perhaps forever trapped in a pointless debate over which band is better, Radiohead or Oasis, I think The Bends makes this as pointless a debate as whether or not Carlos Tevez is a classy footballer. “Fake Plastic Trees” is miles better than “Wonderwall” even though the latter enjoys far greater commercial success.
The most emotive song on the album has to be without doubt “Street Spirit.” As Thom Yorke once said in an interview,
‘Street Spirit’ is our purest song, but I didn’t write it. It wrote itself. We were just its messengers; its biological catalysts. Its core is a complete mystery to me, and, you know, I wouldn’t ever try to write something that hopeless. All of our saddest songs have somewhere in them at least a glimmer of resolve. ‘Street Spirit’ has no resolve. It is the dark tunnel without the light at the end. It represents all tragic emotion that is so hurtful that the sound of that melody is its only definition. We all have a way of dealing with that song. It’s called detachment. Especially me; I detach my emotional radar from that song, or I couldn’t play it. I’d crack. I’d break down on stage. That’s why its lyrics are just a bunch of mini-stories or visual images as opposed to a cohesive explanation of its meaning. I used images set to the music that I thought would convey the emotional entirety of the lyric and music working together. That’s what’s meant by ‘all these things you’ll one day swallow whole’. I meant the emotional entirety, because I didn’t have it in me to articulate the emotion. I’d crack…
Our fans are braver than I to let that song penetrate them, or maybe they don’t realise what they’re listening to. They don’t realise that ‘Street Spirit’ is about staring the fucking devil right in the eyes, and knowing, no matter what the hell you do, he’ll get the last laugh. And it’s real, and true. The devil really will get the last laugh in all cases without exception, and if I let myself think about that too long, I’d crack.
I can’t believe we have fans that can deal emotionally with that song. That’s why I’m convinced that they don’t know what it’s about. It’s why we play it towards the end of our sets. It drains me, and it shakes me, and hurts like hell every time I play it, looking out at thousands of people cheering and smiling, oblivious to the tragedy of its meaning, like when you’re going to have your dog put down and it’s wagging its tail on the way there. That’s what they all look like, and it breaks my heart. I wish that song hadn’t picked us as its catalysts, and so I don’t claim it. It asks too much. I didn’t write that song.
If anyone were to attempt to score a new adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984 ”Street Spirit would have to be the perfect song for that film.
The Bends made the rest of the entire Brit Pop genre irrelevant. Classic songs like “High and Dry” “My Iron Lung” “Just” “The Bends” and “Planet Telex” make The Bends a must have in one’s record collection. And if you have not heard this album and call yourself a lover of music, you ought to be ashamed of yourself! Get yourself to your local record shop and purchase it straightaway!
Rating: An absolute classic, a ten out of ten.
