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.” Though Kathy and Paul have never been romantically involved, his brother Phil describes their relationship like a marriage. “Paul has always been aggressive about things that he wants and needs around other people,” he said. “He’s pretty demanding. But Kathy is more demanding than he is. They’ve had their moments, but they always work it out.” People often come away from meeting Paul humbled. Norman Brown, a retired nurse who has been good friends with Paul since 1971, said: “The guy is such an impressive character … most people are in awe when they first meet him.” Paul doesn’t mind answering people’s questions: “I’m a lawyer, I’m paid to talk!” He likes talking about polio and the lung, and about his life, because what terrifies him, even more than the possibility of Covid-19, is that the world will forget what polio was like, and what he achieved in spite of it.

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 you're a Radiohead fan. It's not a major addition to their catalogue, but it's definitely more enjoyable In 1954, when Paul was eight, his mother got a call from a physical therapist who worked with the March of Dimes, a US charity dedicated to eradicating polio. Paul’s months on the polio ward had left him with a fear of doctors and nurses, but his mother reassured him, and so the therapist, Mrs Sullivan, began visiting twice a week.Paul has always craved independence. But his life depends on his caregivers showing up for work, on his iron lung not blowing a gasket, on the electricity staying on. “He’s been 100% depending on the kindness of others since he was six years old – 100%. And he’s done it by virtue of his voice and his demeanour and his ability to communicate,” said Norman Brown. “I would do things for him that I wouldn’t do for people. For example, he got evicted from an apartment, and he says: ‘I want to egg that manager’s door.’ And when he says ‘I want to do something’, he means you’re going to do it. So we got a bunch of eggs and drove over to that manager’s apartment,” Brown said, laughing. 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.” Paul’s health has always been precarious, but it has declined in the past few years. When I first met him in May 2019, he was a long-term inpatient at Clements Hospital in north Dallas. More than four months earlier, he had developed a persistent respiratory infection, which had sent him to hospital. He also suffers pain in his legs every time he is moved. He had hoped the doctors could help him manage that pain, but, he told me, “It’s not about to go away,” looking up from a pillow on a wide board attached to one end of the lung. His voice is slow, raspy and sometimes punctuated by gasps. Hearing Paul over the machine’s constant sighs requires the listener to focus on him and tune out the lung; accordingly, he is used to being listened to.

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.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? Permanent Daylight, similar to Lewis (Mistreated) has a very MTV vibe to its groove. But this time Yorke has distorted his vocals a little almost blending himself into the instrumentation, this is by all means a good song, but nothing too special and you can tell why it wouldn't make an album as great as the Bends. By the time positive-pressure ventilators were in widespread use, however, Paul was used to living in his lung, and he had already learned to breathe part of the time without it. He also never wanted a hole in his throat again. So he kept his iron lung. At 74, he is once again confined to the lung full-time. Only one other person in the US still uses one. The last person to use an iron lung in the UK died in December 2017, at the age of 75. No one expected someone who needed an iron lung to live this long. And after surviving one deadly epidemic, Paul did not expect to find himself threatened by another. 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?

He passed his bar exams, and on 19 May 1986, he slightly raised his right thumb as he took the oath promising to conduct himself with integrity as a lawyer in front of the chief justice of the supreme court of Texas. He was 40 years old, wearing a natty three-piece suit, living on his own, and able to spend most of his day outside the machine that still kept him alive. I'm a huge Radiohead fan although I like pretty much everything they've released, for me they were at their peak in the 90's. My Iron Lung is an EP that was released after Pablo Honey but before The Bends, and is pretty much a perfect blend of both those albums. For me this is the best EP that they have released, and honestly its better than what they are releasing now post In Rainbows. Three days later, Paul woke up. His body was encased in a machine that wheezed and sighed. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t speak. He couldn’t cough. He couldn’t see through the fogged windows of the steam tent – a vinyl hood that kept the air around his head moist and the mucus in his lungs loose. He thought he was dead.consider one of the best early Radiohead songs. I mean, it's not like it's as walloping as the best 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 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. introduction. Really, all of these softer songs are incredible and nothing less. Very remarkable was "Lozenge Of Love", maily

Kathy knows everything about him, Paul says. “Kathy and I grew together … she stretched herself over as many things as I needed,” he said. For most of their relationship, Kathy has either lived with Paul or nearly next door. They’ve moved a lot: his legal career was not lucrative, and he has struggled financially. Today, Kathy lives upstairs in their communal apartment building. She sees him every day, whether she’s working or not.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. At UT, the caregiver Paul had hired never turned up, so for a month, the guys in his dorm took care of him – even “the most intimate things”, he said – until he was able to hire a new one. Paul graduated in 1978, and later began studying for a postgraduate degree in law. He again made headlines in November 1980: “Iron-willed man leaves iron lung to vote”, declared an article in the Austin American Statesman newspaper. Most days, he would leave the lung around the time other children got out of school, and sit out front in his wheelchair. Friends would push him around the streets; later, as they got older, the same friends took him to diners and cinemas, then restaurants and bars. 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?