High and Dry / Planet Telex

Radiohead's songwriter, Thom Yorke, performed an early version of "High and Dry" with another band, Headless Chickens, while attending the University of Exeter in the late 1980s.^[4] He said the lyrics were about "some loony girl I was going out with", but became "mixed up with ideas about success and failure".^[5]

In 1993, Radiohead recorded a demo at Courtyard Studios, Oxfordshire, with their live engineer, Jim Warren.^[6] They dismissed it as "too Rod Stewart".^[5] However, the demo was rediscovered and remastered for inclusion on their second album, The Bends (1995).^[6] In 2006, Yorke said "High and Dry" was "very bad" and that Radiohead's record label at the time, EMI, had pressured him into releasing it.^[7]

Radiohead wrote and recorded "Planet Telex" in a single session at RAK Studios while working on The Bends. It developed from experiments with a drum loop taken from another song, the B-side "Killer Cars", to which Radiohead added piano processed with multiple delay effects. The band had recently returned from a restaurant, and Yorke recorded his vocals drunk, slumped in a corner. According to the producer, John Leckie, "We had the whole thing down within a couple of hours, which was really refreshing and fun to do."^[8] The original title was "Planet Xerox", but Radiohead were denied permission to use the Xerox trademark.^[8]

The first music video for "High and Dry" was directed by David Mould and features Radiohead performing at the Vasquez Rocks outside Los Angeles. For the American market, Radiohead's American record label, Capitol, commissioned a new video set in a roadside diner, inspired by the 1994 film Pulp Fiction. It was directed by Paul Cunningham. After MTV objected, the video was edited to remove a shot of an exploding car.^[8]

Pete Stanton from Smash Hits gave "High and Dry" four out of five, writing: "It has a Suede-ish vibe to it, minus the whining, and is a mellow-but-not-boring track."^[9] In 2017, Pitchfork credited "High and Dry" and another Bends song, "Fake Plastic Trees", for influencing the "airbrushed" post-Britpop of Coldplay and Travis.^[10] The Irish Times said that "High and Dry" had "essentially invented Coldplay".^[11]