The Greatest Songs Ever! Fake Plastic Trees

MOST BANDS SPEND years trying to score a hit single, but Radiohead have spent years trying to live one down. “Creep” took America by storm in 1993, establishing the Oxford, England, quintet as a transatlantic grunge standard-bearer. Consequently, they found themselves faced with enormous pressure to repeat the success of “Creep” by replicating its style. But although its success was welcome, the song was decidedly atypical of Radiohead’s music.

As producer John Leckie recalls, when Radiohead went into RAK Studios in London in February 1994 to work on the tracks that eventually became the album The Bends, “I was given a brief from the record company to deliver a follow-up to ’Creep’ for the American market. But Radiohead don’t think in terms of making hit singles, and they were disowning ’Creep.’ ”

Singer Thom Yorke has best summed up the band’s disenchantment: “[Fans] used to come for the first U.S. tour and fuck off after we played ’Creep’ mid-set. I wish they never turned up in the first place!”

Nevertheless, after a couple of weeks in the studio, Leckie felt that a few tracks – including “The Bends,” “(Nice Dream)” and “Just” – might have fit the bill as suitable singles. At this point,“Fake Plastic Trees” wasn’t in the running. Guitarist Ed O’Brien remembers that early attempts to record the song came out sounding “like Guns N’ Roses’ ’November Rain.’ It was so pompous and bombastic.”

The RAK sessions stretched over two months, an unproductive and traumatic period for the band that ended only when touring commitments intruded. Not until sessions resumed in mid-July at Manor Studios, a rural retreat near the band’s homes in the heart of leafy Oxfordshire, did “Fake Plastic Trees” really begin to take shape.

According to Yorke, the song had sprung to life many months earlier as “the product of a joke that wasn’t really a joke, a very lonely, drunken evening and, well, a breakdown of sorts.” It was also “a very nice melody that I had absolutely no idea what to do with.” It might have remained just that if not for the imminent arrival at Manor Studios of a violinist and cellist.

“They had decided to use string players for ’(Nice Dream),’ ” Leckie recalls, “so I suggested that if we were having them in anyway, it made sense to use them for two or three tracks. So the night before the string players arrived, Thom went into the studio – under duress, really – and recorded a take of ’Fake Plastic Trees.’ ”

In fact, Yorke wasn’t just under duress – he was going ballistic. “That was one of the worst days for me,” he has said. “I spent the first five or six hours at the studio just throwing a wobbly. I shouted at everyone, and then John Leckie sent everybody else away. He sat me down, and I did a guide vocal on ’Fake Plastic Trees.’ ”

Yorke’s emotional state, however, lifted his performance to another level. “Thom played it in three takes,” remembers lead guitarist Jonny Greenwood, “then burst into tears afterward.”

“It was deeply moving,” confirms engineer Nigel Godrich. “When he sings, he’s as intense in an empty studio as he would be in front of 20,000 people.”

On a purely practical level, Leckie had also achieved exactly what he needed: “A simple acoustic guitar–and-voice track, so we would at least have something we could put the strings onto the next day. That take became the basic track that appeared on the single.”

Greenwood took up the challenge of delivering string parts before the session players arrived the next day – creating a somber arrangement overnight, much in the style of Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings,” which was composed in the 1930s. “Writing the string parts was my studio highlight,” Greenwood admits, “in a megalomaniac kind of way.”

Next, the song was fleshed out with overdubs of Hammond organ, bass and drums to gradually build the intensity behind Yorke’s anguished, world-weary lyrics.

The track also benefited from a happy accident when mixer Paul Kolderie got to work on the tapes. The distorted guitars that lurch unexpectedly into the middle of the final verse were originally planned for the start of the verse, but Kolderie missed his cue. “It was a mistake,” Yorke says, “but we kept it.”

Radiohead now had a track they were happy to release as a single, but it bore no resemblance to “Creep.” Capitol Records was skeptical. “People at the label were nervous about the fact that ’Fake Plastic Trees’ doesn’t really fit into the old commercial-alternative genre sound,” Yorke explains. “We took that as a compliment.”

Against the band’s wishes, Capitol called in heavyweight producer Bob Clearmountain to remix the track in a more radio-friendly direction. Yorke didn’t find the results acceptable, and later explained why to a U.K. magazine: “All the ghostlike keyboard sounds and weird strings were completely gutted out of his mix, like he’d gone in with a razor blade and chopped it all up. It was horrible.”

Ultimately, Capitol relented and released the band’s preferred version. It debuted on the Billboard charts on May 20, 1995, peaking nearly three weeks later on June 6 at number 11 on the modern-rock charts. The cryptic song, about a failed love affair in an artificial world, quickly became a fan favorite and an instant Radiohead classic through a combination of strong radio support, inclusion on the soundtrack of the hit movie Clueless and the unswerving loyalty of Alanis Morissette, who regularly covered it during her live dates through 1995 and 1996.

Yorke still cites “Fake Plastic Trees” as the first lyric on which he really found his voice as a writer. “We were always aware when we were recording it that we would get people moshing all the way through it – the comedy of that, how ridiculous that would seem – and not caring,” he says. “We finished the song thinking, ’Why do we have to pander to that? This isn’t about supply and demand.’ ”