The Radiohead song Thom Yorke thought was released too late: “What nutters we were”
Not every artist can really see the potential of their art unless it’s in hindsight. For every musician who will gladly share with you how they were geniuses for coming up with certain guitar parts or singing their best on any given track, there are just as many who let their masterpieces either fall by the wayside or throw them onto the flipside of a single just to get them out. Although Radiohead were almost clinically precise in how they chose their album tracks, Thom Yorke admitted that the song ‘I Promise’ should have been given the time of day during the OK Computer sessions.
By the time they had begun working on their magnum opus, Yorke had already started to get uneasy with what fame could do to a person. He had tried as hard as he could to outrun the sound of grunge on the group’s first album, Pablo Honey, but while The Bends was still a great record, it did reak of the Britpop tendencies that had become commonplace in England.
That meant that the next record had to take it a step further, and with Nigel Godrich, the raw sound of OK Computer is almost uncomfortably clean. Outside of the beautiful tracks like ‘Let Down’ and ‘No Surprises’, there’s a dark atmosphere that coats every piece of this record looking at the lyrics. Aside from being their answer to ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, ‘Paranoid Android’ is about as frantic as one could get listening to the band’s music, and ‘Exit Music (for a Film)’s ominous final moments are like watching the curtain fall on some Shakespearean tragedy.
By this point, Yorke had also shifted the way he approached lyrics. Even if the song sounded happy, like ‘No Surprises,’ his cynical twist on asking to waste his life away was both sad and beautiful. Whereas ‘Exit Music’ gave them their one acoustic ballad on the record, though, ‘I Promise’ deserved a much better fate than getting discarded.
Because listening back to the tune, it feels like the perfect cross between the openhearted sentiment of ‘True Love Waits’ and the alt-rock grandeur of ‘High and Dry’. He may have asked his lover not to leave in the former tune, but ‘I Promise’ is about raw dependence on someone, as if he’s willing to do anything to ensure she’s happy.
Since the album sessions it came from resulted in a project that was so ominous, Yorke said that ‘I Promise’ should have been released years ago before turning up on the OKNOTOK anniversary edition, saying, “Normally I don’t think we’re the sort of people who look back, but it was interesting when we did. What a bunch of nutters we were and probably still are. One of the crazy things we did was not release this song.”
But sometimes, waiting for a song to reach its final form pays off in the long run. The group had also been working on tracks like ‘Nude’ during these sessions, but when they had the technology on their side in 2007, hearing it on In Rainbows was far more heavenly than anyone could have imagined.
And maybe that’s the key to Radiohead’s success. They know to create the sweet spot for the records they want to make, and even if it means leaving something on the cutting room floor, having a future classic already in the can for the next record is hardly a bad problem to have.
