introduction. Really, all of these softer songs are incredible and nothing less. Very remarkable was "Lozenge Of Love", maily With the decline of the disease, and the visual reminders of it hidden away in a handful of homes and care facilities, across much of the western world the terror of polio faded from collective memory. “You can’t believe how many people walked into my law office,” Paul said, “and saw my iron lung and said: ‘What is that?’ And I’d tell them: ‘It’s an iron lung.’ ‘What does it do?’ ‘Breathe for me.’ ‘Why?’ ‘I got polio when I was little.’ ‘What’s polio?’ Uh oh.” David Oshinsky, the author of Polio: An American Story, believes that the success of vaccines in eradicating so many deadly diseases is precisely why the anti-vaxx movement has gained ground in recent years. “These vaccines have done away with the evidence of how frightening these diseases were,” he told me.

What are EPs anyway? Are they merely cannon fodder to sate the ravenous demands of hungry record company top dogs and fat cats, or do they serve as fodder for hungry and ravenous fans or do they bridge the gap between these two suggestions? Though this virus, if he gets it, will likely kill him, life hasn’t changed dramatically for Paul since the start of the pandemic. He hasn’t been able to venture outside of his lung for more than five minutes in years. As one of his friends told me: “It’s not a strain for him, it’s his life. This is Mr Shelter-in-Place.” I asked Paul if he is worried about Covid-19. “Sure, sure,” he said. Then he added: “Well – I don’t sit around and worry about it. I’m dying a lot. It doesn’t make any difference.” And he went to church. The Pentecostal church, to which the Alexanders belong, is a denomination characterised by a personal, passionate experience of God. At the end of each service, congregants are invited to come to the front of the church and pray. “My dad would take me down there sometimes to pray with him, and he would let all of his emotions out then,” Paul’s younger brother, Phil, told me. “He’d just cry and cry.” because it sounds very much like Pink Floyd's "A Pillow Of Winds". This is not a bad thing though, as it's a very good song. The final Do bands like putting out these EPs? Are they the dumping ground for songs which caused arguments between band members and weren't put on official full length releases as a result, or are new songs created just for the sake of the EP? Is this rule true for B-Sides too?Although he still needed to sleep in the iron lung every night – he couldn’t breathe when he was unconscious – Paul didn’t stop at the yard. At 21, he became the first person to graduate from a Dallas high school without physically attending a class. He got into Southern Methodist University in Dallas, after repeated rejections by the university administration, then into law school at the University of Texas at Austin. For decades, Paul was a lawyer in Dallas and Fort Worth, representing clients in court in a three-piece suit and a modified wheelchair that held his paralysed body upright. But the title of the book was Kathy Gaines’s idea. Kathy, 62, has been Alexander’s caregiver since he graduated from law school and moved to the Dallas-Fort Worth area, although neither can remember precisely when she found his advert in the paper and became his “arms and legs”.

I had all these ambitions. I was going to be president,” he said. But it took his parents, along with the parents of several other disabled children, more than a year to convince the Dallas school system to allow him to take classes from home. In 1959, when he was 13, Paul was one of the first students to enrol in the district’s new programme for children at home. “I knew if I was going to do anything with my life, it was going to have to be a mental thing. I wasn’t going to be a basketball player,” he told me. And, to be honest, I might even like this EP slightly more than The Bends, making it a great Radiohead release. Most of the music Paul spent the first day in his parents’ bed, filling in Roy Rogers colouring books. But even as his fever soared and aching pains blossomed in his limbs, the family doctor advised his parents not to take him to hospital. It was clear that he had polio, but there were just too many patients there, the doctor said. Paul had a better chance of recovering at home. How long should a review of an EP be? More to the point, and topical with regards to this discussion (although I wouldn't so much call this a discussion as a lecture, but I think the terminology is more appropriate for a Friday afternoon spent sleepily nursing a hangover behind a desk), how long should a review of a mediocre, hit and miss EP be?

52 Reviews

How much is reasonable to charge for such a release? Generally they seem to be priced at about two thirds of the price of an LP but with only half the songs, and it is hard not to ponder the question: Is This RIGHT? My Iron Lung is an EP released in 1994 by Radiohead. I wouldn't call this EP progressive at all, but it definitely features some fine Paul struggled with trying to pay for a full-time carer and his education at the same time, but in 1984, he graduated from the University of Austin with a degree in law, and found a job teaching legal terminology to court stenographers at an Austin trade school. When a newspaper reporter asked if his students found it uncomfortable to be in his class, he responded: “I don’t allow people to feel uncomfortable for very long.”