Synopsis

Radiohead drift through a surreal supermarket in shopping carts, surrounded by brightly colored shelves and strangely detached customers. Thom Yorke is pushed through the aisles while the other band members appear in similarly passive, isolated poses. Among the shoppers are a bearded man playing with toy guns, a bald man shaving his head, and a young man fooling around with a cart. The sterile, artificial setting turns everyday consumption into an unsettling dream of boredom, alienation, and emotional exhaustion.

Factoids & Trivia

• The video's supermarket setting gives a literal visual form to the song's recurring ideas of artificiality, consumerism, and things that look real but are not.

• The products on the shelves are deliberately difficult to identify. Their bold, color-coded presentation makes the store feel more like a constructed set than a functioning supermarket.

• Norman Reedus appears briefly as the young man playing with a shopping cart. He was still largely unknown at the time and later became famous for playing Daryl Dixon on *The Walking Dead*.

• The video was included on Radiohead's 1998 home-video compilation *7 Television Commercials*, which collected the band's major videos from the *The Bends* and *OK Computer* periods.

• "Fake Plastic Trees" was released in 1995 as the third UK single from *The Bends* and the first US single. An acoustic version also appeared in the film *Clueless*, helping expose Radiohead to a wider American audience.

• The song itself was recorded at RAK Studios in London in 1994. Producer John Leckie later recalled that the version captured during those early sessions remained the basis of the finished recording, despite the band's uncertainty about the arrangement.