THE BENDS (5:25)
available on: the bends

THE BENDS (4-TRACK DEMO)
available on: long live tibet

notes: phil: "i wanted to get away from the studio to view a house for rent. consequently, this was the first take." ed: "weird to have finally recorded this song after playing it live so many times. this track really highlights jonny's abusive guitar playing". jonny: schlang! schlang, schlang, schlang; schlang... schlang! that's the bends full of air". colin: "a perennial hardly annual of a live favourite, faithfully committed live to tape". thom: "listen out for the recorders. i do. this song is so old i have no idea what it means anymore. for which i am glad."

more: Douglas Coupland's Generation X is one of the few books of recent times that can be described as epochal. The book's ironised sense of protest clearly shares much with Radiohead. ''I read Generation X and thought: .I've got this sussed' , Thom has said. Conversely, on this song he argues against any generational labelling. The satiric lines, "I wish It was the '60s. I wish could be happy. I wish, I wish, I wish something would happen" (recalling the ironic Jim Morrison reference of Anyone Can Play Guitar') led Thom to explain in interviews that "Levi's jeans wish it was the '60s, I certainly fucking don't." The accompanying cacophony conforms to what Colin Greenwood called the album's "hit everything loudly whilst waggling the tongue in and out" factor. The introductory marching-band noise, recalls producer John Leckie, was recordled from a hotel room window in America as a children's marching band passed by. The chorus twists the standard "baby's got... " lyrical convention.Where, say, Elton John would sing "blue eves", Thom substitutes " the bends". Considering the hardships they'd endured since surfacing (utterly ignored before 'Creep' took off, flogged around the globe afterwardsl, it's easy to see what this became the title for the group's second album