A while ago, I sat down to write my final essay for a subject I was taking towards my Literature major at university, and, non-conformist and closet indie-kid that I am, I thought it might be fun to write a few thousand words in defence of popular music lyrics as serious poetry. The idea was to take a few examples from the British pop music canon – The Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby”, Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here”, and, most contemporarily, “Street Spirit (Fade Out)”, the final track from Radiohead’s 1995 record The Bends – and subject them to my scintillatingly brilliant (of course) analysis in order to demonstrate their fundamental poetic value.
Anyway, my dyed-in-the-wool traditionalist Poetry tutor reacted predictably, and gave me a rather mediocre mark (kids, mark my words: bucking the system does not pay!), but amidst all the outrage at my attempt to elevate the scrawlings of a bunch of tousle-headed musos to the level of serious literature, he did have one valid criticism, and it was this: I had neglected the context in which the songs were written.
See, that’s the thing about The Bends. It is a truly timeless album, arguably even more so than the band’s magnum opus OK Computer, and certainly more so than the under-rated but flawed Pablo Honey, or the self-consciously (albeit beautifully so) weird Kid A and Amnesiac; but it’s also a record thoroughly of its own milieu. No other band has so perfectly captured the pre-millennial despair of the nineties – for a whole generation of post-grunge teens, Radiohead were to Nirvana as Joy Division had been to the Sex Pistols, and it was with The Bends that they really came into their own.
What Radiohead did with The Bends was create, in twelve carefully-crafted, brilliantly left-of-centre songs, a document which perfectly captures the (post)modern individual’s alienation in contemporary society. Musically a mix of indie-rock anthems, acoustic ballads, atmospherically melodic meanderings, and a couple of interesting, almost Pixies-esque rockers, the album is given an underlying coherency by Thom Yorke’s haunting vocal delivery – which switches effortlessly from the angelic to something reminiscent of Munch’s painting “The Scream” – and the distinctive musical and lyrical sensibilities of the band.
“Planet Telex” gets things off to a promising start, fading in with something that sounds like wind blowing through a post-industrial landscape, followed by a dense, evocative four minutes of echoey, reverb-drenched alt-rock glory, melodically obscure but all the more compelling for it. It’s not one of the album’s finest songs, but it is an ideal scene-setter for what is to come. In a word, cool.
It’s followed by “The Bends” itself, also tres cool, and the first real sign that “Creep” wasn’t the only generational call to arms that Radiohead had up their collective sleeves; also, I might add (and this may be controversial), possibly the best song on the album.
Next up are the two songs which single-handedly inspired an entire movement (that is, if you consider a bunch of vaguely similar sounding, mostly British bands with sensitive, clean-cut, upper register-favouring type vocalists to be a ‘movement’) – “High and Dry” and “Fake Plastic Trees”. In terms of paean-like rock ditties, it doesn’t get much better than this – plaintive, simple tunes, tremulously, feelingly sung by Yorke, and the whole wreathed by a gorgeous film of delicate guitars. As to the words he’s singing – well, don’t get me started on them. All I’ll say is that they’re lyrical in the true sense of the word, and have come to mean the world to countless fans, me included.
The album takes a definite turn for the darker from this point (although the first four songs of the album are hardly sweetness and light), with the middle section of the record kicked off by the abrasive, slightly raw-sounding “Bones” and continuing with “[Nice Dream]”, an appropriately nightmarish excursion into Yorke’s troubled dream-life which floats along on a disconcertingly lullaby-esque melody.
The band then proceed to rock with the jagged, raging “Just” (a favourite amongst the fans, and also possessed of one of the coolest videos ever), before moving on to the soft verse/loud chorus anthem “My Iron Lung”, in which the band’s social vision and perspective find their clearest expression:
We’re too young to fall asleep,
Too cynical to speak,
We are losing it
Can’t you tell?
We scratch our eternal itch
Our twentieth century b*tch
And we are grateful for our iron lung
After the lyrical virulence and distortedly shouted choruses of “My Iron Lung”, “Bullet Proof...I Wish I Was” comes as something of a relief, its gently cascading layers of melodies giving the song a fragile prettiness which is further enhanced by Yorke’s tentative, sighing vocal delivery, and it in turn is followed by one of the record’s finest moments, the unutterably gorgeous “Black Star”. This is how the soft/loud thing should be done, complete with epic, fade-in intro and yearning coda; in fact, the album could have ended here, and I would have died happy. But it’s just as well it doesn’t, for after the by now familiar (but still rather good) ‘I want what I can’t have’ rock of “Sulk”, Radiohead reach once more into their bag of wonders and come out with “Street Spirit (Fade Out)”.
Opening with an unhurried, almost stately guitar line which anchors the rest of the song, “Street Spirit” is a sweepingly grand, understatedly moving piece of pop music perfection, a neo-Floyd moment in which Radiohead somehow both encapsulate and expand the album’s clear, sad-eyed vision, and without which, in retrospect, The Bends would surely have seemed incomplete.
“Immerse your soul in love,” Yorke sings, and as those final words soar upwards and drift away, it’s impossible not to reflect on the appropriateness of this album’s synthesis of the timeless and the timely – for The Bends is a classic, and destined to endure.
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