My Iron Lung

My Iron Lung is the third EP by the English alternative rock band Radiohead, released on 26 September 1994 by Parlophone Records in the United Kingdom and by Capitol Records in the United States. The title track later appeared on the band's second studio album The Bends (1995). The EP also contains outtakes from then-ongoing recording sessions for The Bends, compiling songs that were issued as B-sides on two separate "My Iron Lung" CD singles in the UK and other markets.

My Iron Lung
EP by
Radiohead
Released26 September 1994
Recorded1993–1994
GenreAlternative rock[1]
Length28:23
Label
Producer
Radiohead chronology
Itch
(1994)		 My Iron Lung
(1994)		 The Bends
(1995)
Radiohead singles chronology
"Stop Whispering"
(1993)		 "My Iron Lung"
(1994)		 "High and Dry" / "Planet Telex"
(1995)

My Iron Lung was originally released as an EP with all eight songs only in Australia, but it is currently in print worldwide. It is seen[2] as a bridge between the relative simplicity of their debut studio album Pablo Honey (1993) and the greater sonic depth of Radiohead's later work beginning with The Bends. The title track charted at number 24 in the UK, but received little radio attention in the United States.

Recording

"My Iron Lung" was Radiohead's reaction to "Creep" (1993), their successful debut single.[3] The caustic, self-reflexive lyrics use the iron lung as a metaphor for the way "Creep" had both sustained the band's life and constrained them ("this is our new song / just like the last one / a total waste of time / my iron lung").[4] Songwriter Thom Yorke said in 1995: "People have defined our emotional range with that one song, 'Creep'. I saw reviews of "My Iron Lung' that said it was just like 'Creep'. When you're up against things like that, it's like: 'Fuck you.' These people are never going to listen."[5]

Radiohead recorded versions of "My Iron Lung" at RAK Studios, but were not satisfied with the results. Instead, they used a performance recorded in May 1994 at the London Astoria, with Yorke's vocals replaced and the audience removed.[6] According to producer John Leckie, "Considering it was recorded in the back of a truck outside the hall - not the best sound to get something from - we did quite well."[7]

Nigel Godrich first worked with Radiohead on this recording, going on to engineer The Bends and to produce their later work.

An acoustic version of "Creep" appears at the end of the EP.

Release

Other songs on the EP charted a course away from the emotional grunge-pop of Pablo Honey, toward more layered sounds and more inventive guitar parts from Jonny Greenwood, especially evidenced in the ethereal "Punchdrunk Lovesick Singalong" and the Sonic Youth homage "Permanent Daylight", whose vocals ("the easiest way to sell your soul is to carry on believing that you don't exist / it must be hard with your head on backwards") hide in a wall of noise. "The Trickster", like the title track, approaches heavy metal. "Lewis" is musically a punky sequel to Pablo Honey's "How Do You?" but the lyrics may point to "Just" from The Bends, both serving as a warning to seemingly oblivious friends on the verge of breakdown. The acoustic "Lozenge of Love" uses unusual tonality and is titled after a line from Philip Larkin's poem "Sad Steps", while "You Never Wash Up After Yourself" is a quiet, desolate song for guitar and voice.

In Britain and most of the world, this EP was initially available instead as two singles: the first, with a blue-tinted cover, featured the title track backed by "The Trickster", "Punchdrunk Lovesick Singalong", and "Lozenge of Love";[8] the second, with a red-tinted cover, had "Lewis (Mistreated)", "Permanent Daylight", and "You Never Wash Up After Yourself"[9] as B-sides. "Creep (Acoustic)" (which had also closed the earlier Japanese Itch EP) only appears on the EP release.

The "My Iron Lung" single was released only to US college radio stations, where it fared poorly. According to Jonny Greenwood, "It was released to colleges, and suddenly it was being played by some other stations, but there was no real release planned, but oh never mind, we'll just see what happens ... It's like you don't have to play it, that's all right. What? This is strange. I don't think any harm would be done by people hearing it outside of colleges."[6]

Critical reception
Professional ratings
Review scores
SourceRating
Allmusic[10]
Entertainment.ie[2]

Allmusic critic Greg Prato described the tracks as "great outtakes from the sessions for their classic 1995 full-length release The Bends" and stated: "Because of the tracks' consistency and sequencing, it plays like a real album rather than a collection of B-sides and outtakes thrown together haphazardly."[10] Entertainment.ie wrote: "While these off-cuts are inevitably more low-key and experimental than the classics we're all familiar with, the same spirit of anguish [of The Bends] and fragility is still thrillingly familiar."[2]

"My Iron Lung", along with an acoustic version of "Fake Plastic Trees", is featured in the 1995 film Clueless.[11] It is featured as a downloadable song for Rock Band.[12]

Track listing

All tracks are written by Radiohead.

No.TitleLength
1."My Iron Lung"4:36
2."The Trickster"4:40
3."Lewis (Mistreated)"3:14
4."Punchdrunk Lovesick Singalong"4:40
5."Permanent Daylight"2:48
6."Lozenge of Love"2:16
7."You Never Wash Up After Yourself"1:44
8."Creep" (Acoustic)4:19
Total length:28:23

Personnel

Production

  • "Permanent Daylight" produced by Nigel Godrich and Radiohead
  • "You Never Wash Up After Yourself" recorded live in a fruit farm by Jim Warren
  • "Creep" (Acoustic) recorded live on the air at KROQ Los Angeles, July 13th 1993
gollark: https://isotropic.org/papers/chicken.pdf
gollark: https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/629419596428083210/777242606102380574/unknown.png?width=427&height=422
gollark: You'd have to keep decreasing it for every repost though.
gollark: I didn't. Depending on how it gets split into blocks or something it might work.
gollark: Based on something or other it runs on perceptual hashes which use a discrete cosine transform thingy, so it might be easiest to DCT the image data, fiddle with the parameters a bit, and convert it back.

References
  1. Hall, David Brendan (10 October 2016). "Austin City Limits: The five best of Weekend Two". Time Out. Retrieved 16 January 2017.
  2. "Radiohead – My Iron Lung". Entertainment.ie.
  3. "Radiohead's The Bends At 20: The Story Of An Anti-Capitalist, Anti-Cynicism Classic – NME". NME. 12 March 2015. Retrieved 9 May 2018.
  4. Runtagh, Jordan; Runtagh, Jordan (22 February 2018). "Radiohead's 'Pablo Honey': 10 Things You Didn't Know". Rolling Stone. Retrieved 23 May 2019.
  5. Malins, Steve (April 1995). "Scuba Do". Vox. IPC Media (55).
  6. Garcia, Sandra (July 1995). "Decompression". B-Side (51).
  7. Randall, Mac (1 February 2012). Exit Music: The Radiohead Story Updated Edition. Backbeat Books. ISBN 978-1-4584-7147-5.
  8. "Radiohead – My Iron Lung E.P." Discogs.
  9. "Radiohead – My Iron Lung". Discogs.
  10. My Iron Lung at AllMusic
  11. James, Becca. "Cinema Sounds: Clueless". consequenceofsound.net. Consequence of Sound. Retrieved 23 September 2016.
  12. "New Rock Band DLC: Weezer, Radiohead, The Pretenders". WIRED. Retrieved 9 May 2018.

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