super groovy delicious bite: the bends

Radiohead came like a comet, creeping away from one hit wonder into a cynical polystyrene weirdness with this brilliant existential decompression. The group had found a measure of success with the single "Creep" from their debut album 'Pablo Honey'; but were discouraged as the tour went on and on, delaying the recording of their new album. Guitarist Jonny Greenwood looks back: "It's funny: on one side it sped things up for us, because it meant that Radiohead became...we never felt that Radiohead was successful,..we felt Creep was successful, but it got our name put about, so that sped things up for us. But at the same time it meant that we recorded our second album about a year late, The Bends, most of it was written within months of recording our first record, and we had to tour and tour and we couldn't stop to record. So that slowed things down for us."

John Leckie and Nigel Godrich were instrumental in the production and engineering of the sessions that began at RAK Studios in London and continued at The Manor in Oxfordshire and finished up at Abbey Road Studio in London. The recording featured Thom Yorke on vocals, guitars, piano, string arrangements, songwriting, artwork, and illustrations; Jonny Greenwood on guitars, organ, keyboards, synthesizer, piano, recorder, string arrangements, and songwriting; Colin Greenwood on bass guitar and acoustic guitar; Ed O'Brien on guitars and backing vocals; and Phil Selway on drums, percussion, and acoustic guitar; with Caroline Lavelle on cello and John Matthias on violin and viola.

Philip Selway considers: "I think when we started work on The Bends it was kind of like pausing for a breath. So much had happened over the course of Pablo Honey, from the recording to the tour and all that, and then “Creep” doing what it did. It felt as though things moved very quickly for us. The band went from touring around the UK in a small spitter van to these large tours in the States in a matter of a couple of months. So it felt like we had to play catch-up. It felt quite intimidating in a lot of ways. It was undoubtedly exciting, though, as well. But when we started to record The Bends, that felt like clear time again. We were riffing and writing around Oxford, so we were back at home and actually felt like a very recognizable process. It’s something we’ve done for years, getting together and shutting ourselves away in a rehearsal room and writing and arranging material. That felt as though, from my point of view anyway, that we were reconnecting with ourselves after having been in very, very unfamiliar territory...We were still wet behind the ears at the time, and perhaps actually having that kind of reassurance in working with somebody who was that musical and had that breadth of experience and actually wasn’t going to be phased by anything, that gave us a very secure basis to work from. It took a little while to get there. The initial sessions probably were a little fraught from our point of view, but we got there, and John guided us through that process. So he was fantastic to work with...We had high expectations of what we could do at that point. I think we were still relatively inexperienced in the studio, so our studio chops probably weren’t quite up to it at the time. And I think we wanted to be ambitious with the record. So you get all those things, and probably the initial sessions we were just feeling frustrated with ourselves, and it showed in what we did at the time. But it was part of the process. We needed to go through that to get to the good takes on the songs...We started recording at RAK Studios in London. That’s where the first sessions were, fantastic studio, and Nigel was one of the in-house engineers there. He had come up through the kind of trainee system there, so he was a very, very knowledgeable engineer by that point, and experienced...[When] we went to a studio called the Manor, which is not far away from where we lived in Oxford. We’d upped stakes from RAK Studios and just went off tour and just played material live in New Zealand and Australia and a couple of festivals on the continent in Europe. And so it kind of felt like replaying the material as a band over those shows, and going back into the Manor studios, I think things really fell into place quite quickly...At the time, it felt like a very, very long process. But looking back on it, it was actually probably about four months of recording, which is not really that much actually."