Radiohead – The Bends

I / The last dinner you had before you left Mumbai for London three years ago was with X. Over the ten years prior to that meeting, you’d been some iteration or the other of a couple for a sum total of six-odd months. If you’re honest, though, your relationship was a lot closer to a ten-year-long friendship than anything else. At least, those were the terms you remember employing to describe what she was certain you both would begin to lose the moment you left Mumbai the morning after that dinner together. She was at the airport the next day; it was her and your parents waving you goodbye as you left the city. Only for a couple of years, you’d said to all three of them; but all three of them had known better. 

Three and a half years later. 

II / You’re in mainland Europe – somewhere in the continent’s northwest. Alone in an English pub run by the English, frequented by the English. Union Jack hats pinned up on a wall, a Rule Britannia poster with the Queen’s eyes crossed out, that famous propaganda poster of a high-ranking army official from the colonial era pointing at YOU, asking YOU to join YOUR country’s army. Most brownfolk with a sense of history would likely find much of the imagery here discomforting, but most would overlook it; it’s driven by ignorance, they’d conclude, rather than a desire to cause offence. The pub’s been playing the Bends, all the way from Planet Telex on; this is a strange sort of place. Now, track 3, High and Dry, rings out from the tinny tannoys. You’re pissed on IPAs. 

At the bar, a woman in her late fifties maybe, from the south of England somewhere, sits alone. She’s wearing a Clash t-shirt, ears of steel, tattoos of snakes hanging off the bones of each of her forearms. I was, what, twenty-eight when they released the Bends, changed rock music forever. You wonder if Radiohead really did change rock music forever when they released the Bends – when they released Kid A, maybe, but the Bends? What if they’d never released Kid A in 2000 (or OK Computer in 1997)? Would anyone tout High and Dry as having belonged to a genre-defining masterpiece? Or would the world of music just view the Bends as what it certainly is – an exceptional rock record? 

What do you know? In 1995, you were only recently conscious. In 1995, the year AR Rahman released Bombay and Rangeela – two soundtracks that forever changed the landscape of popular music in India – you’d only recently heard of addition. Rangeela is X’s favourite Rahman soundtrack, or at least that’s what you remember it being. Yours is Bombay. Five years ago, the two of you had spent a night arguing the relative merits of each, before reaching a truce – Dil Se (or rather, the original Tamil soundtrack, Uyire), you both concluded, was his best work.

You know they played some really weird electronic music there, the woman at the bar is mumbling about some place somewhere. None of this new garbage, really experimental stuff. You know that’s where Johnny – Johnny Greenwood, Radiohead’s guitarist – hung out every Thursday for years leading up to Kid A? It’s possible none of this is true, of course – about whatever place she’s describing. You’re sure Johnny spent many Thursday nights in 1994 at home or at a grocery store or at someplace quiet. All memory is fiction. The Bends rings on. The sombre sleeper hit Fake Plastic Trees is leading to Bones. Off in the corner, a Liverpudlian whacks a cue ball onto the sticky plastic-wood sheet that drapes the pub’s cement floor. Cacophonous laughter follows. Did you know there’d never been a video like the one these guys made for this song? It changed music videos forever. 

III / A week ago, back in Mumbai for the first time in three years, you met X over whiskeys. I remember you happier; back when we were together, she’d told you then. I’m not saying it was because we were together. I’m saying it’s just that I remember you were happier five years ago. You’d wondered when the two of you were ‘together’. (Were you ever ‘together’?) Nevertheless, the salient point of what she’d said is that maybe your move to London had made you unhappier. That – reading between the lines – she thought you should maybe consider returning to Mumbai, a city that made you happy. 

Your favourite track off of the Bends – Just – reaches its crescendo. A mostly atonal guitar solo collapses into itself: the most distortion, you’re certain, Radiohead employed on any of their singles. You see its video in your mind’s eye: in it, a suit collapses onto the street in a bustling business district. Did you know they used to play techno there? Before the walls fell and the coppers came. That’s where I leant to sing, that’s where I learnt to rave. Did you know I danced freestyle there? All the older guys would stand and stare. I think I’m losing my edge. I’m inching closer to the grave. She could just as well be talking about Nero: a cubbyhole adjacent to a suit-and-tie French-style bistro in the upscale Mumbai suburb in which you were raised. They played techno there. Before the walls fell and the pandus came. It’s where you learnt to sing, to rave. You danced freestyle there. The older guys stood and stared. You're losing your edge. You're inching closer to the grave. 

I’m engaged, X had informed you, right when you’d taken the first sip of your second drink. He’s nice. Kind. Not the sort who’d have ever found himself at a place like Nero, you think. The sort of guy who’d have been more at home at Maison de whatever. How would you feel if your favourite DJ’s now a suit? And he stays in Fridays because the little one’s just turned two. And forget about Saturdays because the eldest’s having trouble in school. The barkeep smiles the tired smile of a barkeep who sees a one-sided pool game draw to a close. Street Spirit (Fade Out) plays. Fade out again, Thom Yorke's voice whines. Were you happier at Nero? Who’s to say? All memory is fiction. We filter reality through the lens of our drive to survive. We suffer. We cope. We move on. 

IV/ You step out for a lone cigarette, the last of the Indian cigarettes you bought from the paan shop outside the Starbucks that now stands in place of Maison de something-or-other and Nero: the cigarette shop closest to Whiskey Bar, the bar at which you met X. You remember this place, you’d asked her, offering her dismissive wave a cigarette. Starbucks, she’d joked in response. No, Nero, the place that was here before. What’s Nero? She’d replied. You don’t remember Nero? That place where they played some great electronic music. Not the sort they’re playing at the Whiskey Bar. Real experimental stuff. The best music in town, back in the day. We’d come here once. Arkade was playing. 

She’d shrugged, I just remember this one place you dragged me to, here somewhere, maybe this Nero place, with this really bad soundsystem. I think it was back when we’d first started dating. You were really trying to impress me, I remember. You said you frequented it, but I think you were just trying to pretend to have street cred. You’d laughed as she’d continued. Smelly. Makeshift bar. No fire escapes. You just stood awkwardly bobbing your head and saying “I didn’t know it’d be this dingy, sorry.” That the place? You’d responded by telling her about the obituaries that’d been written two years ago when Nero shut down: each half paean, half dirge, another casualty of the pandemic – a bastion of Indian electronica. That’s callous, she’d replied. The loss of a club is not comparable to the loss of human life. 

That’s not what I meant, you’d protested. I just wish I could’ve been there is all: for the final show they put up. Probably illegally.

A super spreader event?

Maybe. But anyway, I was in London. Locked down.

As you now recall, stubbing your cigarette, that’s what had led her to say you were happier in Mumbai: or at least insinuating as much. Maybe you were. Who’s to say? Maybe you were less callous. Maybe you went out on dates with women you didn’t know very well. Maybe you lied about your street cred in an attempt to impress them. All memory is fiction. If we were once whole, we can be made whole again. If we were once great, we can be made great again. Everything we see is fiction. We construct elaborate adventures in our minds to lend our lives colour. When everything falls apart, it’s our narratives that hold us together. 

The pub’s swinging doors open behind you; the woman in the Clash t-shirt stumbles out. She ambles away noiselessly.