This fondness for camp and schlock has always been latent in Radiohead’s music, and teasing it out doesn’t take too much detective work. The same goes for “Pearly,” in which Yorke leers about “vanilla milkshakes” and moans “use me, darling, use me” over a nearly- Led Zeppelin III-sized stomp with an arpeggiated coda straight out of “House of the Rising Sun.” It was “a dirty song for people who use sex for dirty things,” Yorke used to joke when introducing the song in concert. If “Palo Alto” had seen official release, it would have stamped them with the brand for life with the lava-lamp psychedelia of its winding central guitar riff, it is very nearly a Kula Shaker song, and it also happens to be the song that gave OK Computer its name. After The Bends, Radiohead were briefly lumped in with the other bands in the “Britpop” scene, an association they never relished. The most fun to be had with OKNOTOK is in these line-blurring moments, hearing how the lost material informs the original album. The song doesn’t land all that far away from the chiming lullaby “No Surprises,” then, with its job that slowly kills you and the bruises that won’t heal. That lilting chorus of “Today is the first day of the rest of your days” isn’t a promise it’s a death sentence, and the hapless soul inside it is doomed to expire soundlessly in the intestines of some soulless corporate edifice. The protagonist is stuck in an elevator, a piece of mundane modern technology that has suddenly halted and trapped us inside it.
It’s a lovely, weightless strummer of a song, and watching them send it shimmering out over a field of blissed-out stadium concertgoers in 1996 is the clearest mental picture you can get of this alternate history come to life.īut “Lift’s” reputation for positivity might be a little confused in the song’s lyrics, the title is a noun, not a verb. Radiohead have always treated these songs, the ones that came before OK Computer truly took shape, with a wry sort of kid-brother affection: The storied B-side “Lift,” which finally sees inclusion here, was once seen as a “bog-shite B-side,” in the words of Ed O’Brien. The “rarities” included here have never been all that rare, and many of the songs included on this set (“How I Made My Millions,” “Polyethylene”) live in readily accessible digital eternity on Spotify and have been performed live for more than a decade. OKNOTOK is something a little more interesting than a remaster with tacked-on B-sides and rarities, even if that’s technically what it is. But now, years on, they are cracking open its vaults, perhaps to slyly underscore the point that they were always more human, and connected to good old hoary rock music, than their reputation suggests.
More than 20 songs were winnowed down to 12, in fact, and the narrative the discarded tracks suggest has been kept under quite deliberate lock and key by the band.
For every dour “Paranoid Android” thunderclap, there was a shimmering, lighter “Melatonin” as its B-side. Their sessions weren’t exactly a deep-dive into hell, despite the record’s now-concrete reputation as a piece of digital-age prophecy. But there has always been a tantalizing alternate-history version of Radiohead’s third LP lurking behind the finished product. It’s unclear what happened to that album. No more iron lungs, or songs inspired by brutal gun rampages, he swore: This time, he told NME, “I’m deliberately writing down all the positive things I hear or see.” It’s still funny to think, two decades later, that Thom Yorke’s first answer to that question was to create Radiohead’s first “positive” album.
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