At the turn of the century, Radiohead released two albums that forever altered their identity. Now, Kid A and Amnesiac are reissued as a pair, along with whatever worthy B-sides, alternate versions, and outtakes they can find.
Kid A and Amnesiac, released eight months apart, have always had a big brother/kid brother relationship. They were recorded at the same time, during the same sessions, but Amnesiac inevitably became seen as a repository, the place where the music that wasn’t on Kid A found a home. As a standalone album, its reputation has been unsettled since the minute it was released—in a glowing New Yorker profile that same year, Alex Ross watches them tersely correct a hapless young MTV News reporter who accidentally refers to Amnesiac as the “outtakes.” “Try again,” snapped Phil Selway.
The band separated the two releases because they wanted to avoid releasing a double album, that most tired and bloated of rock-excess beasts. At the time, avoidance of all rock-star gestures had become something of a survival mechanism for the band. They had been touring, more or less continuously, for the past seven years. Six months into the long, punishing tour for OK Computer, Thom Yorke had briefly slipped into catatonia. They were getting more successful, and it felt awful: Watch the 1998 documentary Meeting People Is Easy and you’ll see what rock stardom felt like to Yorke’s nervous system—dull, pointless torture, like being detained for eternity by airport security.
When they began the fitful, labored studio sessions that would produce both Kid A and Amnesiac in late 1999 and 2000, Radiohead knew very little about what they wanted, only that they did not want to be “rock stars” anymore. Their new music, whatever else it might be, must accomplish that singular objective: All rock-band gestures were to be isolated, rooted out, and erased. They wanted to, as the song title had it, disappear completely.
A Radiohead axiom is that whatever the band set out to do, they usually wind up accomplishing the exact opposite. When they went in to record OK Computer, Thom Yorke declared confidently that they were about to make their first “positive” record. And when they released Kid A—the album meant to chart a new course away from the rock-star treadmill—it became their first-ever album to simultaneously top the U.S. and UK charts. Even more than “Creep,” which had only blown up Stateside, Kid A was now their big hit. Eight months later, Amnesiac would reach No. 2. They had gone as far away from guitar-based rock music as they knew how to go, and at the end of it, not only were Radiohead still a rock band, they were a generational one. All roads led back to the arena stage, even their escape route.
In the last five or so years, the band seems to have come to terms with its status—Selway and Ed O’Brien graciously accepted the band’s nomination into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2019. In 2017, they entered their commemorative re-release phase with OK Computer OKNOTOK 1997 2017, which collected the band’s foundational third album along with its ephemera. Now, they have finally released that long-avoided double album: Kid A Mnesia, which unites the two studio albums, along with whatever worthy B-sides, alternate versions, and outtakes they can find.
Like many of their recent gestures—putting their music on Spotify for fans, years after Yorke memorably dubbed the streaming service “the last desperate fart” in the music industry’s “dying corpse”; releasing hours of their demos for OK Computer after someone hacked their MiniDiscs from the sessions—it feels like an act of both generosity and capitulation. They have long since stopped fighting, but these albums capture the band when the stakes felt mortal; in recording these albums, they were fighting for their lives.
During the recording sessions, the band was frequently aimless, frustrated, certain only that they were accomplishing very little. On the online journal he maintained on Radiohead’s website during the recording sessions, O’Brien worried publicly that the band was steering itself toward oblivion. “It’s taken us seven years to get this sort of freedom, and it’s what we always wanted,” he wrote. “But it could be so easy to fuck it all up.” At times, it seems like every one of them was casting about in different directions, returning with half-cooked pieces of music that nobody else quite knew what to do with. They didn’t know what kind of band they were supposed to become, but they all knew they were tired of the band they were currently in. None of them had one clear, resounding idea for a new direction.
One of the earliest songs they struggled with was “In Limbo,” which layers guitar triplets over straight 4/4 drums, both of which slid off the surface of the underlying 6/4 meter. Rhythmically, it created a featureless expanse with no distinguishing marks, and the song’s pulse resembled ocean waves more than any sort of backbeat. Perhaps in a nod to the song’s maze-like rhythm, perhaps in acknowledgment of the quicksand they felt underneath, they called the demo “Lost at Sea.”
Meanwhile, Jonny Greenwood was fooling around with modular synthesizers, playing patches of radio static and snatches of electronic music records over rudimentary drum machine patterns, searching for a moment of inspiration. Yorke listened to it patiently, and found only 40 seconds of usable material—four refracted synth chords from the American composer Paul Lansky’s computer piece “Mild Un Liese.” The seeds of “Idioteque” were planted.
In all this seeming directionlessness, Radiohead were zeroing in on the most primal essence of their art—sound. Critics at the time knocked Kid A and Amnesiac for seeming half-formed, or sketch-like, but the de-emphasis on things like bridges and middle-eights seemed strategic. The members were seeking textures and tones, spaces expansive and inviting enough that they might stay awhile. In doing so, they reinvented the timbral palette for a rock band.
It was on Kid A and Amnesiac that they became in love with almost recognizable sounds. What was born out of a desire to erase—and Yorke used this word more than once, suggesting a vigorous desire, naming his solo album after this impulse—became an opportunity to transfigure. The standard rock instruments became the ghosts—nothing in Kid A sounds so otherworldly as the guitars, or Yorke’s voice. On “Morning Bell,” Greenwood scraped the strings with a coin to produce keyboard-like sounds.
The disembodied guitar sounds mingled eerily with the ondes Martenot, an instrument Jonny Greenwood mastered after becoming obsessed with the music of French composer Olivier Messiaen. Messiaen employed the ondes Martenot in his celebrated large-scale 1948 work Turangalîla-Symphonie, which generated ecstatic, alien textures from the full orchestra and the early electronic instrument’s disembodied whine. The ondes Martenot is everywhere on these two albums—whining alongside the string section in “How to Disappear Completely,” doubling the guitar and vocals on “Optimistic.” It is deployed as a forbidding chill whenever the textures threaten to get too familiar. Likewise, it’s the non-rock instruments that are allowed to breathe, to exist in a recognizable shape as themselves—a harp glissandi, for instance, or a harmonium, both on “Motion Picture Soundtrack,” or the wailing New Orleans brass band on “Life in a Glass House.” These are the warmest textures on albums that defined digital-age paranoia, and they predate electricity completely.
Kid A was the first Radiohead album released in the harsh light of the Napster era, the dawn of music’s digital age. Because of that, the songs that would come to comprise Amnesiac were already pretty familiar to Radiohead fans who had been trolling P2P servers for new material. Live and demo versions of “Dollars and Cents,” “You and Whose Army?” and “Pyramid Song” were freely traded over Napster, as were a few of the outtakes that didn’t make either album.
This means that none of the bonus material on Kid Amnesiae, the third “bonus” disc accompanying the two studio albums, has the same revelatory quality as the inclusions on OK Computer OKNOTOK 1997 2017. The tracklist is padded out slightly with the isolated string tracks for “Pyramid Song” and “How to Disappear Completely,” as well as a murmured two-minute take on “Morning Bell” that sounds like a rehearsal for the version that appeared on Amnesiac. There is no “I Promise,” no “Lift,” no bolt-from-the-blue alternate history that redefines our understanding of the band that wrote the album material. “Follow Me Around,” which was billed as the big inclusion on this re-release and the “holy grail” for Radiohead fans, is a song that most Radiohead hardcore faithful know extremely well—it was included in a pivotal scene of Meeting People Is Easy.
Another “lost” Radiohead song from these sessions, “Fog,” is a little more intriguing. It was one of those nakedly vulnerable ballads that slipped out of Yorke from time to time, seemingly against his will. The grief-haunted lyrics mingled tenderness and dread—a child, possibly dead, runs forever up and down a hallway, while a luminous fog belches up from the sewers.
They first premiered it at a concert in Israel, where it was known as “Alligators in New York Sewers,” in July 2000. The live version is a simple, arresting two-minute piano ballad. The original studio version, which found its way into the world as one of the B-sides to the “Knives Out” single, preserved this intimacy, but was marred by a slightly out-of-time tambourine and an uncertain-sounding guitar part. The version they include here isn’t as good as either, with overly bright synth patches and a non-committal vocal take. It underscores the trouble that Radiohead have often had with their tender songs. If there is anything comical about the band, it is their distrust of their own instincts to write beautiful songs, and the agony and prolonged discomfort it seems to provoke in them.
If not for this slightly adolescent distrust of prettiness, however, Kid A might never have been born. “It annoys me how pretty my voice is,” Yorke famously griped, and the last 20 years of their music can sometimes be seen as a battle between Yorke’s uglier impulses squaring off against the choirboy lilt of the instrument he’s stuck with.
Yorke’s impulse to deform himself on record, however, led to moments of wild creativity. On Amnesiac’s “Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors,” seven years before Lil Wayne’s “Lollipop,” he intentionally mangled his voice with the AutoTune. As an entire generation of hip-hop performers would go on to do, Yorke mumbled into the machine, allowing the pitch-corrector to randomly assign a key and a melody to his words.
Perhaps no single song encapsulates this mix of aimlessness and invention, the will toward prettiness and the losing war against it, as neatly as “Like Spinning Plates.” In the studio, they were grimacing their way through another demo—the chord progressions were somehow insulting, too obvious. Thom Yorke, always quick with a withering aside for their own material, dubbed it “dodgy Kraftwerk.”
They couldn’t stop messing with it, however. No idea the band generated, no matter how wispy or maddeningly incomplete, seemed to stay away forever. (Yorke apparently wrote the bassline for “The National Anthem” when he was 16, and it sounds like it.) Their song fragments were like sick dogs that wouldn’t stop limping after their masters. So there was Greenwood, messing around with the latest playback of that pretty ballad. Out of boredom, a fit of pique, whatever, he played it backwards.
Yorke, who was nearby, was transfixed. He crossed the room and demanded to hear it again. The track, played backwards, sounded like it was sucking nearby debris inward and pulling everything down with it. Yorke sat down and wrote a new song on top of his upside-down old one. But the backwards/forwards vortex seemed to have inspired a fever. So he sang his own lyrics backwards, on purpose, live. Then he reversed them so we heard them forwards—a subliminal message, just like the hysterical censors told us there would be when we played our records backward. But there it was, floating on the surface like a plastic bottle on the ocean.
That original upside-down song was a pretty ballad called “I Will,” which they would go on to rework, yet another time, and release for 2003’s Hail to the Thief. Radiohead fans have long tried to sync up the two versions themselves, re-reversing “Like Spinning Plates” and laying the vocal take from “I Will” atop it to recreate that “dodgy Kraftwerk” demo that is lost to history.
Kid Amnesiae does not include that original “I Will” demo, which, given the juvenilia and ephemera the band has allowed to see the light of day by now, suggests just how much Yorke must still hate it. The “Like Spinning Plates” version on the bonus disc layers the grand piano arpeggios familiar from the version on I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings atop the backmasked effects of the studio version. Notably, Yorke adds a verse that brings his desire for escape at the time into urgent focus: “Why us? Why not someone else?/The cameras are turning off.” Like Bob Dylan post-motorcycle crash, doing everything he could to discourage the press and his fan’s interest only to increase his enigmatic appeal, Yorke struggled against the straitjacket of his band’s grandness only to feel it pull tighter.
Decades later, the grandness of those sounds is what lingers. This is Radiohead’s ultimate gift as a rock band—the transmutation of sound into sensation, the way an unnerving bit of audio can play upon our nerve endings, up-end us ever so slightly. The searching language of the chorus to “Like Spinning Plates” (“This just feels like…Spinning plates”) nailed the curious, uneasy feeling that sound can give us, and the way those feelings translate into our other senses. It was the indelible sounds they made on Kid A and Amnesiac, more than any of the album’s digital age paranoia or its baleful view of the future, that comprise the band’s enduring legacy. Those sounds break free of anything you might want to attach to them.
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