(EP Single from album, "The Bends")
“Creep” – the song of 1993? Well if not, still ‘so very special’. It’s something of a statement from Radiohead; a brilliant combination of semi-stolen Hollies bassline and screeching lead guitars, which perfectly contrast the strangled vocal, deprived of love and understanding with every choked syllable. (Hey, it’s a favourite of mine, so what if I ham it up a little?) Whatever people say, Radiohead fans especially, it is one of their best songs and the perfection of the sound and lyrics just came at an incredibly bad time for the band – the beginning.
By the time early 1994 came around, Tom Yorke felt quite differently about the song. The highlight, both actually and commercially of their debut album, “Pablo Honey”, “Creep” quickly became something of an inescapable trap for the relatively new band, whose entire career was fast becoming based on and revolving around a single song, a song not even entirely composed by them, Albert Hammond having sued them for ‘copying’ from 1969’s “The Air That I Breathe”. As such, “Creep” wasn’t only strangling the band, and preventing their post-“Creep” success from occurring, but it was conversely gaining them followers and getting them dates – people needed their fix of the song, including hearing it played live.
This perverse combination of both hatred for the song and need for it’s wide acceptance as the ‘only Radiohead song worth listening to’ both diminished the actual quality of the debut album, and inspired this track, written by Yorke, originally as a therapeutic, self reflexive exercise, but later pulling the band out of the very pit which inspired their new venture’s genesis…
The ‘iron lung’ in the song is “Creep” – both stopping them from being free, and constraining them, but entirely necessary in the survival of the band. The ‘wall of sound’ technique, used on and off throughout “Pablo Honey” is also used extensively, both on the later 1995 album “The Bends” and on this track, where, after about a minute, every instrument and sound effect plays at once, frying the sound waves and crashing down like the thrashing guitars on a metal record, but with skill and, actually, very interesting results, as opposed to the latter…
The EP released shortly before the preceding “The Bends” in 1995, is a very good compilation of B-side material, so good that it could be mistaken for single releases, as well as the song itself, and also an acoustic cover of a cleverly arranged previous track.
Exploding out of the self implosion that is “My Iron Lung”, “The Trickster” is churned out of the speakers, and incredibly in your face with a similarly repetitive bass-line and guitar track, climaxing in a crescendo of indie ‘noise’, the rusty accordion adding a rather ironic, alternative feel. “Lewis (Mistreated)” is nothing short of an A-side quality track, its anti-climax sound, winding downward, the ideal indie record, complete with its own cheapened sound and distorted vocals. Next up, “Punchdrunk Lovesick Singalong” swoops around, jumping up into uncomfortable keys and majors in a swirling “No Surprises”-like motion, in a very deifying Radiohead moment of melancholia and slow guitar composition, an added keyboard giving it its perfect finish. “Permanent Daylight”, like the last song, sounds odd, with bizarre drum timings and, for the first time on the EP, real speed, with “Lozenge Of Love” doing something remotely jazzy afterward, before sounding more like “Across The Universe” by The Beatles, with it’s very Indian atmosphere. In my opinion, the best song on the release, “You Never Wash Up After Yourself” is miserable, miserable and miserable. Brilliant piece of music, brilliant words, and in many ways, the ultimate precursor to 1997’s “OK Computer” with its sharp sound, lyrics on neurosis, and dark, slow tone. It seems only fair then that the EP should conclude with a beautiful acoustic cover of the original iron lung, “Creep”. It would be unfair to give the track any more description than ‘unparalleled brilliance’. “My Iron Lung” might have something negative to say about their debut hit, but honestly, after hearing this, you may find yourself being very forgiving…
There’s also a very wholesome completeness to the sound on the opening track, especially. The wonderfully mixed, low-down, looping bass line drives the song and acts as the heart beat monitor in the frequently revisited lyrical concept of life support throughout the track. The guitars are also well layered, and the smooth, more acoustic moments are reflective and deep in contrast to the desperate, claustrophobic thrashing that accompanies those ‘wall of sound’ moments later in the song. The signature riff is also a tremendous ‘noise’, wailing at the start, and wailing at the end, like the vocalist, and adding a great sense of atmosphere to the scenario. The lyrics themselves are also just as hard to decipher as in other Radiohead tracks, and the mumbled sense of mistake in hearing York’s words, does just the same as the latter riff. It all very much works in conjunction with itself, every element perfectly complementing the other, as in classical music. This is a very intelligently thought about sound, and that, is quite rare… especially when it is considered just how ‘high quality’ the UK chart was in 1994; it is incredible that a song like this could exist, a million years ahead of its time in production technique and sounding nothing like the Britpop which originated from the same music scene, around a similar time.
Perhaps an added sense of incredible accomplishment on this track would be that it was recorded live and slightly overdubbed afterward, but other than that, is one original and perfect take. Genius. X-Ok in fact.
★★★★★
Versions of “My Iron Lung”
Album/Single Version – 4:36