“It frustrated us”: the song Thom Yorke called a musical train crash
Some of the greatest Radiohead songs of all time often feel like they have been carefully constructed in a lab. Nothing that the alternative rock cyborgs have ever done has been easy to grasp, and when listening to some of their masterpieces, it’s hard to think of any record since Pablo Honey that hasn’t taken long hours to get right. But all music is evolving even when an artist leaves the studio, and Thom Yorke knew that a handful of songs didn’t necessarily have to be finished by the time they handed in the master tapes.
Then again, it’s hard to think of a single note that is out of place when looking at records like OK Computer and Kid A. Both of them had a specific agenda in mind whenever they started recording them, and when they finally released songs like ‘Idioteque’ or ‘Paranoid Android’, it’s hard to think of anything that they could have changed to make it any more perfect. But for the band, every visit to the studio is like their own personal songwriting workshop.
Compared to some of their classics, a record like Amnesiac is far more interesting because of how ramshackle it can seem. There are still great songs to be found like ‘Pyramid Song’ and ‘Knives Out’, but given that most of the record was recorded around the same time as Kid A, it almost feels like the strange little brother of its predecessor, especially with the peculiar moves into genres like jazz on ‘Life in a Glasshouse’.
If that record felt slightly disjointed, Hail to the Thief is one of the band’s most fragmented releases. Does it still have good songs? Sure. ‘2+2=5’ is one of the most disorienting openings they have ever had for one of their albums, but as you go through the rest of the record, there are moments that could have been trimmed and the odd song that could have been thrown onto a B-side instead of given space on an album.
“A song like ‘Myxomatosis’ – 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.”
Thom Yorke
In a perfect world, their fifth outing could have been a tight ten-track experience, but ‘Myxomatosis’ should always remain a core part of the tracklist. The band seemed to leave their status as a rock band behind on Kid A, but this was the first time they actually put some fire behind their riffs, even if the syncopation is tricky to follow along with when banging your head to it.
In fact, that disorientation made Yorke say that the entire track was a bit of a mess, saying, “A song like ‘Myxomatosis’ – 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; and 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.”
If there’s anything that ‘Myxomatosis’ did right, it reminded the band of what they could do if they plugged in their guitars again. By the time they reached In Rainbows, songs like ‘Jigsaw Falling Into Place’ and ‘Bodysnatchers’ felt like they took all of the lessons that they learned on their previous record and finetuned each song to the point where it felt like a living, breathing entity whenever it took off.
So, really, Hail to the Thief stands as a great middle ground between Radiohead’s strengths. There were bound to be some strange moments throughout its runtime, but a track like ‘Myxomatosis’ helped prove something to the fans. The band had been flirting with new approaches all the time, but they could still remind people that they were a great rock band when they wanted to be.
