It’s probably never changed anyone’s life, which is as harsh a criticism as you’ll hear of the band’s post-‘Pablo Honey’ output. But while its soaring histrionics and plodding 3/4 rhythms plant it in the dated tradition of stadium-baiting Britpop, it’s still some of the best, tricksiest stadium-baiting around. By the record’s release, it was said to be their least favourite track on the record. Slated early doors as a lead single, ‘Sulk’ slid down the pecking order as the record shaped up in mightier proportions. Recorded in 1993, this is the oldest and safest song on ‘The Bends’, signposting a Britpop back-alley the five-piece might have traipsed in a beige alternative lifetime, seemingly designed to keep tortured singer-songwriters at open mic nights occupied long into the next century.

Speaking about ‘High and Dry’, Jonny Greenwood once laughed that it’s a “really horrible kind of single, but in a nice way… one of those songs that people hopefully would be playing as soon as they learned guitar or something.” If the slight dismissal seems harsh, you at least see where he’s coming from. As a familiar social climate greets the record’s 20th anniversary, we revisited its twelve tracks to see how its antsy anti-anthems stand up. ‘The Bends’ is a fraught, compassionate, violently disturbed rock classic that’s since rippled through everyone from Muse to Coldplay, from brass-tooting megastars to every lank-haired teen self-certified as a guitar maestro the moment they learnt to fingerpick ‘Street Spirit’.īack in the mid-‘90s, the record hit home because it was everything pop needed at once: a flick-off to Britpop’s laddy orthodoxy, a melancholy hymnbook for alienated consumers and a rich, dreamy rebuke to Thatcher’s austerity politics, which patronised with aspirational slogans while obliterating the nanny-state arts funding that gives people a leg up. So that March, his bookish Oxford brood put it to rights. By Thom Yorke’s reckoning, Britain in 1995 was a mess: culturally crippled and socially “fucked over by the Tories” (his words), it was an era dominated by retro-necrophiliac rock and a jaded generation’s unrealised dreams.

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