“Absolutely amazing”: The Radiohead song Thom Yorke thought got better live
Hail to the Thief is often overlooked when it comes to Radiohead albums. Many have dismissed it as being a bloated mess, lacking the focus or inventiveness of the less disputed classics before it such as OK Computer, Kid A or its successor, In Rainbows.
By the time it came out in 2003, Radiohead had already reached a point where the standard they set themselves was so high that even the smallest drop in quality would be taken as a drastic change. For many fans and critics, Hail to the Thief doesn’t even live up to the heights of Amnesiac, an album that is ostensibly made up of Kid A’s offcuts.
In reality, it’s actually a masterful amalgamation of everything they’d done as a group prior, fusing together the electronic experimentation of the previous couple of albums, the guitar-led sound of their earlier work, and the increasingly dour worldview that Thom Yorke used to ramp up a sense of anxiety in their narratives. If anything, it serves now as a great entry point for any newcomers to the band, allowing listeners to decide which aspects of their catalogue they might enjoy most and go from there.
Despite the occasional derision it gets from even the most hardcore Radiohead fans, not to mention the band themselves, there are a number of tracks on Hail to the Thief which do get lauded as being up there with the best from the Oxford band.
‘2+2=5’ sets the tone for the bleak Orwellian landscape that the album lives in, ‘There There’ is possibly as close to art-rock perfection as the band ever wrote, and the closing track ‘A Wolf at the Door’ is emphatic in the way it ties up the themes of the record, but still ekes in the same paranoia that is felt across many of the other tracks.
Sitting towards the end of the album, ‘Myxomatosis’ is probably less talked about than others, but it has always been a staple of their live show due to the way the band ramps up its urgency and turns it into this aggressive beast. Radiohead was always known for trying out new ideas and showcasing works in progress at shows, often debuting songs several years before they would ever see the light of day on a studio album.
This is a fine example of Radiohead’s road-testing of a track, having first performed it in summer 2002, a year before Hail to the Thief’s release and a few months prior to the album’s recording sessions. It wasn’t always one of Thom Yorke’s favourites though, and seemingly had a bumpy road to fruition, but something clicked during live performances of the track, where the crowd would go absolutely wild for the song much to the band’s surprise.
“When we did it in the studio, we kind of liked the sound of it, but it really frustrated us, because we didn’t really understand where it was going,” explained Yorke in an interview with The Observer in 2004. “Then we played it live, and the last three or four times we got this absolutely amazing reaction. It was like a train crash, you know? And sometimes these things happen.”
With ‘Myxomatosis’ being such a nervy song, and one of the most immediately obvious to interpret songs on Hail to the Thief in terms of its themes, it’s a surprise that a track that is largely about Radiohead’s relationship with the media and the fickle nature of fandom (often helped by its subtitle ‘Judge, Jury & Executioner’) is one that incites such a wild reaction.
Yorke mentions that this isn’t the only song that has provoked an unexpected reaction from crowds in the past, with ‘No Surprises’ taking on a life of its own with US audiences in particular who resonated with the line “bring down the government”. This one also seemingly surprised the band due to the slow nature of the song, but then again, when you’ve written a song that good, surely you’d expect your fans to go a little berserk for it.
