“Approach number 561”: The Radiohead song that took 21 years to complete
If one thing sets Radiohead apart from the rest of the rock and roll set, it is their unwavering dedication to moving forward.
The band have rarely rested on their laurels or found itself guilty of loitering in the same creative space for too long. From one album to the next, the Oxfordshire group are always pushing these melodies towards the next platform. An innate sense of movement makes them exciting and deliberately artistically ethical.
It feels strange, then, that one song might be able to slip from one album so easily onto another, let alone a track take 21 years to finally make an appearance in the studio. Despite first performing ‘True Love Waits’ in 1995, it would take over two decades before Radiohead felt comfortable enough to share it with the world. For years, it seemed as if the song had succumbed to a position of internet folklore among their hardcore fans before the band restored control of the narrative in 2016.
‘True Love Waits’ was first performed live by the group during a concert in Brussels in December 5th, 1995, while they were touring The Bends. Initially, the song was a stripped-back effort performed solo by Thom Yorke before a keyboardist joined him for the latter part of the track. It returned to Radiohead’s setlist for six shows and sporadically appeared in their concerts until 2006.
Although the band persisted in playing ‘True Love Waits’ live for over a decade, Radiohead continually failed to do the track justice when they attempted to record the song in the studio. The track was originally planned to feature on the band’s third album, OK Computer, but the Oxfordshire group suffered a change of heart and decided against the recording on the final cut.
Rather than discard ‘True Love Waits’ to the cutting room floor, Radiohead attempted to record new versions of the track for Kid A and Amnesiac. However, the track couldn’t find a home on either album and was placed back on the archive shelves. Around the making of Kid A, guitarist Ed O’Brien wrote in his studio diary: “[It’s] been kicking around for about four years now and each time we approached it we seemed to be going down the same old paths. It actually sounds like the start of something exciting now”.
A month later, O’Brien returned to the subject and wrote: “This is something like approach number 561 but it is a great song. It’s simply trying to find a way of doing it which excites us. And we may have found a way, at the very least we’ve found a new approach … It may of course be utter crap and we have so lost the plot on this song. Please don’t let that be the case.”
In 2012, Radiohead’s longtime producer Nigel Godrich told Rolling Stone: “We tried to record it countless times, but it never worked. The irony is you have that sh*tty live version. To Thom’s credit, he needs to feel a song has validation, that it has a reason to exist as a recording. We could do ‘True Love Waits’ and make it sound like John Mayer. Nobody wants to do that.”
After two decades of tirelessly trying, Yorke finally recorded a version of the track he was happy to release, and ‘True Love Waits’ was included as the closing song on 2016’s Moon Shaped Pool. Compare the original live version of the song and the finished track below.
