Songfacts®:

• The "bends" is a scuba diving term. It refers to a condition caused when a diver surfaces too fast.
• "The Bends" is the title track to Radiohead's second album, released in 1995 following their 1993 debut, Pablo Honey. Lead singer Thom Yorke explained how the song came together: "We wrote this song before completing the first album. The sound at the beginning come from the cacophonous rumpus outside an hotel in the US. A guy was dragging 8-year-old kids to parade with all their instruments. This guy had a small mike on his sweater and he kept shouting: 'Yeah, keep it up, keep it up.' So I went outside and recorded him."
• According to Q magazine April 2008, the band worked through several takes of this song because they were initially concerned that it sounded too bombastic. Jonny Greenwood tried many different guitar-and-amp combinations before returning to his original Fender set up at the Manor studios in Oxfordshire. There, the track was finally completed.
• Thom Yorke said in Melody Maker June 1995: "The song 'The Bends' is completely jokey, completely taking the piss. None of that stuff had ever happened to us when we wrote it."
• John Leckie, the producer of The Bends, recalled to Q magazine April 2008 the recording of the album: "I love the album but by the end of the sessions I felt devastated. Without telling me, the band sent copies of the master tapes to the States to be mixed by the Americans who produced Pablo Honey. It was the first time it had happened to me. After 100 days' work I felt like I'd given birth to a dozen babies and had them all taken away. I wasn't even invited to the final playback. The band chose me as producer because I did the first Magazine album Real Life, which they were all big fans of. I suggested we use the Manor studio in Oxfordshire but they said it was 'too rock 'n' roll' and went for Mickie Most's RAK studio in London, where they worked solidly for nine weeks. Thom would be there when the studio opened at 9 o'clock, working on his own at the piano before the others turned up at 12. After that the band went off on a tour of the Far East. When they came back they weren't happy with a lot of what we'd done at RAK so they decided they would use the Manor after all. After that I went to Abbey Road to start mixing. I heard later the band said it was like the schoolteacher had left the room. Maybe it was an age thing, I was 20 years older than them. They felt more comfortable with RAK's assistant engineer, this young guy, Nigel Godrich."
• For years, the accepted wisdom about "The Bends" was that Radiohead wrote it as a barbed broadside at the supposed glamour of fame, a reaction to the runaway success of "Creep" in the US.
  
  Thom Yorke, however, has long delighted in puncturing that theory. "Well, no," he told Melody Maker. "That song was really just a collection of phrases going round in my head one day. No calculation, no great plan, just whatever sounded good after the last line. It was written way before we'd even been to America."
  
  Still, the myth has proved hard to kill. "Yeah, it's always interpreted as this strong reaction against a place and everything that went with it for us," he shrugged. "But I wrote it before we even recorded the first album. We hadn't been anywhere."
  
  Which makes "The Bends" less a cautionary tale about stardom than a reminder that sometimes a song is just a song, albeit one that history can't resist giving a plot twist.