Incredibly, Radiohead’s The Bends is 30 years old, having been released on 13 March 1995. Their second album after 1993’s Pablo Honey clearly marked a road ahead that Radiohead would increasingly make all their own.
While their debut pulled all the right strings to land them 1990s-guitar-band record company buy-in (and dutifully birthing global hit Creep), The Bends is the band doing what they’d rather have been doing instead.
Now, to mark its 30th birthday it looks like someone Chez ‘Head has been rooting around in the attic and – doubtless jammed in between Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey and series seven of Seinfeld – found an old VHS tape…
It bears a new live video of a Thom Yorke performance showcasing the then brand-new The Bends, and the band have thoughtfully placed it on their YouTube for fans to enjoy for free.
“We found this VHS tape of Thom performing at the Horseshoe Tavern, Toronto in 1995 for the release of The Bends,” the band wrote in a bluesky post.
Recorded on 28 March, 1995, the gig features Yorke performing a five-song acoustic set as the opening act for the Horseshoe Tavern’s Nu Music Night.
It’s not clear whether the audience in attendance realised the significance and enduring nature of what they were about to witness at the time, but Yorke’s unplugged renditions of The Bends standouts (Nice Dream), High and Dry, Street Spirit (Fade Out), and Fake Plastic Trees certainly hit the spot.
Plus there’s a final take of Pablo Honey’s Thinking About You, doubtless for those requiring that he “play something we know…”
You can watch the full 24-minute performance above.
And it looks like Yorke and the rest of the band could be on the brink of some more new fan-pleasing activity with Yorke announcing he was teaming up with Mark Pritchard for a new project, Tall Tales (out 9 May on Warp Records) and the filing of a brand new legal partnership bearing all the fingerprints of a new Radiohead project on the way.
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