On Radiohead’s The Bends, there’s a theme about the fear of getting old that shows it’s face throughout the record. On ‘Bones’, Thom Yorke sings about not wanting to be “crippled and cracked”. On ‘Fake Plastic Trees’, he talks about gravity always winning in reference to aging women who went through plastic surgery in the 1980s. Thom Yorke would have been 25/26 when working on the lyrics for the songs that would make up The Bends. But even then, I think it’s fair to say he might have been going through some existential crisis of some kind at the time. I think as we all do when we get to that mid-20s period. And closing the album off is a song about a thing we all know is certain in life. Death. The track is ‘Street Spirit (Fade Out)’, one of the group’s most sombre numbers which also happens to be one of their most popular too.

When it comes to me, well, I think I first came to know about the song when its music video played on MTV2, or one of those alternative music video channels, back in the 2000s. In between 2003 – 2007, when the band were on a bit of a hiatus, a Radiohead music video showing up on those places was a regular occurrence. Probably because the band were known to have some of the coolest of those types of media. The video for ‘Street Spirit’, with the whole manipulation of time thing going on in its scenes, was cool to witness to the small kid I was at that time. Thought it was so cool, in fact, that I tried to find the video online, which in a pre-YouTube world was very hard to do. Can only imagine what it must have felt like seeing something like it in 1996, when the song was released as a single. The track may be one of the band’s darkest. But man, if it isn’t catchy in its own uniquely bleak way. When that opening, circular guitar riff gets going, it’s very hard to stop listening to everything else that follows.

In the first verse, Thom Yorke depicts an image of a helpless figure feeling closed in by the houses that surround them. The second sees him referring to a machine that can’t communicate “the thoughts and the strain [he’s under]”. This got me thinking, maybe he’s talking about his guitar. Maybe he was really going through some things at the time. Or maybe he’s taking a point of view of a general machine used by an employee somewhere. After which he suggests we unite and be people of the world before we all end up underground. And in the third verse, he brings up imagery of cracked eggs and dying birds screeching through their lasts breaths. I did mention this song was bleak, didn’t I? Despite all this, the music is extremely infectious. You’ve got the riff I talked about in the last paragraph, but then there are the “Ah-na-na” vocals during the instrumental breaks. And then there’s Yorke’s actual vocal take, which just soars over everything. He changed up the way he sang from OK Computer onwards, so to have that Pablo Honey/Bends era style finish on this track is a massive way to go out. All very morose, but a lot of people love it, including myself, to the point that, if given an opportunity, there will sing it even louder than Yorke at a live performance. Like in the one below.