Tom Dunne: I can't believe The Bends by Radiohead is 30 years old
Thom Yorke of Radiohead. Picture: Jim Dyson/Getty Images.
Radiohead’s classic album The Bends is 30. To quote Fiddler on the Roof: “I don’t remember growing older, when did they?” But there you go. That’s life. Blink and its over. And like Radiohead’s music its full of suffering and misery. But as with their music, the worst thing is: it’s over too fast.
Long winded contemplations on “The Bends at 30”, or “long reads” as they are now called, are oddly divided about it. For most it’s a marker album, a prelude to “what came next.” For others, it isn’t even their fourth-best record.
I think it is a remarkable album. I remember it being released. It took about a year for me to really take it all in. I kept discovering new aspects, depths, amazing bits. It was the least expected second album ever. Nothing about Pablo Honey, the debut, suggested this.
I had just started in radio, on a late-night show that was ostensibly Totally Irish. But after a few weeks I’d started to slip a few songs in by local Irish act Rady O’Head. No one batted an eyelid. I added The Pixies (Mary Black’s brother) and songs from Billy “Patrick” Corgan. We were onto something.
The drive home at 2am was ghostly. Dublin was asleep, pre-Celtic Tiger, pre massive employment, pre-Google or Intel or Apple and pre anyone not born here wanting to live here. The Bends on cassette gave the drive a wonderful David Lynch quality.
I was also in the early days of dating my now wife. One day we were driving, and she looked at me like someone she had never seen before. She seemed to be calling me from some remote planet. I heard her voice, “Tom. Hello, Tom, earth to Tom.”
I came to. “Yes?” I wondered. “You’ve played that song about ten times in a row,” she told me. “Have I?” I answered, weakly. The song was Nice Dream, and it was a cassette, so every replay took a physical holding down of the rewind button and that little backward rewind noise.
“Ten times! Really!” I honestly hadn’t noticed.
As 1995 wore on, a year of era defining albums from Blur, Oasis, Pulp, Teenage Fanclub, Bjork, The Chemical Brothers and PJ Harvey, The Bends became the album you name checked if your music credentials were ever questioned. It ended all debate.
It was startling, unexpected, masterful, a quantum leap, groundbreaking. Tom York’s voice, the guitars, the mood changes, the lyrics, the plaintiveness, the heartbreak, the pleading, the shear humanity, the blinding originality. How had they done it?
I hate to say it, but I was one of the 30 or 40 people that saw Radiohead when they played The Rock Garden in Dublin on their Pablo Honey tour. I don’t know how I came to be there, possibly a record company connection, but I was there with all of my band Something Happens.
We brought to the table the usual “other band attitude” issues. Irish bands ruled at the time, it was with reluctance we checked out the Brit newcomers, coming over here, with their guitar riffs and their plaintiff vocals and their innovative arrangements and twin guitar virtuosity.
When Thom Yorke hit Creep and that amazing little guitar stab kicked in, I can remember sharing a look with our guitarist. The last time we’d shared a look little that had been when we heard The Pixies’ Doolittle in the back of a car in LA as we’d prepared to record our second album.
It was a look of mild panic, followed by a string of under your breath expletives.
We followed Radiohead’s progress after that, amazed that the rest of Pablo Honey didn’t seem to set the world alight. We followed their travails as American record company pressure tried to turn them into an American “hair band.”
It could have gone either way. But then they released The Bends. It elevated everything around it. You can dismiss Brit Pop, but at some point as you list that era’s albums you will name check it too and think “what a time to be alive.”
On a later radio show I was challenged by my boss. He’d have liked more Boyzone. “What are you plans for this show?” he demanded. “If the new Radiohead is good, I’ll play it a lot.” I told him. “And if it isn’t, I don’t know what I’ll do.” I stand by that still. If this album was released today. I’d play it to death.
