Twenty years ago and five thousand miles away, I stopped off at a record store on my way home from school to buy my copy of Radiohead’s second record, The Bends. I don’t exactly recall laying my money down on the counter or rushing home with the CD clasped in my sweaty hands, but the baritone howl that leads into the first chords of the album’s opener, Planet Telex, still gives me goosebumps.
It had been a little over a year since I’d arrived home to find my mother waiting for me at the front door with the news that my father had died, and I’d elected – in a way that remains characteristic of my approach to trauma – to carry that particular cross on my back right through the horrors of puberty. I was still, on the outside, a fairly normal teenager, but my preference was increasingly for my own company, for staying locked in my room with loud music, for thoughtful, late night walks where I smoked Marlboro Lights until I felt ill and tried to wrestle my thoughts into some kind of coherence.
I’d never wish to be fifteen again – 1994 was the worst year of my life and ’95 wasn’t too far behind – but all these anniversaries can't help but remind me how it felt when everything meant something, when keeping my wounds open and bleeding was a source of dumb pride. On a date a few months back, a woman who barely knew me said I was calcifying. I sneered at the language, following as it did a conversation about her weekly therapy sessions, but the accuracy of the sentiment wasn't lost on me. My problem these days is that I barely feel at all.
The Bends is a criminally overlooked part of Radiohead's canon. Its predecessor, Pablo Honey, is more or less a by-the-numbers indie rock record, likeable but nothing special, and the two albums that followed, OK Computer and Kid A, are probably the most celebrated of the band's entire output. The Bends is just sort of there, a surprisingly good follow up to a mediocre debut that nonetheless lives in the shadow of its successors.
It's my favorite of Radiohead's albums by some distance, largely because it found me at a time in my life when I needed it, but also because it represents - with the benefit of hindsight and context - the last time that this was a band without artifice. If Pablo Honey is the sound of a naive Radiohead without direction, The Bends is their epiphany, a realization of the monster they were creating and becoming. They made smarter records afterwards, clever cultural critiques that were successful enough to encourage ever bolder steps, but it was never this personal again.
Lyrically, there's resistance to this thematic progression. Perhaps the main reason The Bends resonated so strongly with me is that so many of the songs are pleas from somebody falling beneath the waves of a world they can't find a place in. No accident that the album is named for decompression sickness.
"Where do we go from here?" asks the very first line of the title track. "The words are coming out all weird. Where are you now, when I need you?"
It's the first of many questions and accusations. "You're turning into something you are not," Thom sings on High And Dry, then later, on My Iron Lung: “We’re too young to fall asleep, too cynical to speak. We are losing it, can’t you tell?” and on Black Star: “What are we coming to? I just don’t know anymore.”
The album’s closer, Street Spirit (Fade Out) ends with the repeated line, “Immerse your soul in love,” which, within the context of both song and record, seems a final plaintive demand to hold on to something.
Interestingly, the second line of the very first song on OK Computer is: “In a neon sign scrolling up and down, I am born again.”
I didn’t apply such analysis to The Bends when I was fifteen. I just knew it spoke to me and understood me. Before I started writing this, I looked up the record store where I’d picked up the CD, curious to see exactly how many miles away it was. Seeing the names of streets I hadn’t thought about in forever provided a juxtaposition with the lyrics I planned on referencing that was almost nostalgic. Twenty years ago, I lived somewhere between the two, walking endlessly through suburbs that never felt like home, trying to understand who I was and where I was going. Now, I don’t know. I feel a certain amount of peace, I suppose, but it’s academic. I can put the events and the emotions in their right places, construct something linear that makes some kind of sense, but most of the time I feel like all I did was age, like twenty years isn’t much more than a heavy coat you can wrap around yourself so nobody sees the scars. Like there is no grand narrative, just a suspicion, ever less subtle with each year that passes, that this is it.
Or, to take it all the way back to Planet Telex: “You can crush it but it’s always here. You can crush it but it’s always near, chasing you home, saying everything is broken.”
posted at 12:09 PM