Turn it off and on again

Remember when artists were nurtured and given time to find some kind of defining voice? Who would have thought from their earliest efforts that, come their third album, Radiohead would be taking rock music to new places and reluctantly defining an era?

It marks the point when they both expanded their musical horizons way beyond the student union indie of their formative years, and started creating something that felt altogether more insular. There’s a weed-heavy, humid atmosphere to songs like Subterranean Homesick Alien and Climbing Up The Walls that suggested they were finding more in common with the likes of Massive Attack and Portishead than the Britpop they were lumped in with. It was the album when bassist Colin Greenwood and drummer Phil Selway’s influence came to the fore: one for the heads, as they say. But still, there was room for mass communication; Thom Yorke’s voice was never as focused or affecting as on Exit Music (For A Film) and Karma Police and No Surprises remain startlingly pretty, disaffected arena gloomfests. Even the untethered Paranoid Android was a bona fide smash hit – different times. Of course, Electioneering and Fitter Happier remain very skipable, but who wants perfect?

It’s an album that’s not hard to find – the standard version is re-pressed almost yearly, while a deluxe edition featuring contemporary B-sides was released in 2009 (all present and correct again here, the likes of Polyethylene (Parts 1 & 2) and Meeting In The Aisle would have been career-defining for some bands).

So the main draw here is the first release of three songs with myth-like status among the infatuated. I Promise has the swoonsome feel of Out Of Time-era REM covering a long-lost Roy Orbison number; Yorke doing that thing he used to do where he achieves a kind of lift-off countered by disciplined, marching band drumming and oddly beautiful, synthy-sounding strings. Man Of War is one of those foreboding, Bond theme-ish big rock songs they were doing so brilliantly around this time and would have swanned on to The Bends, or sulked even. The final “new” one, Lift, was reportedly put to one side as it seemed just too surefire a hit – as if the near-albatross Creep had burnt them. It’s an undeniably brilliant alt.rock song, with surprising echoes of the grandstanding, otherworldly melancholy of prime Smashing Pumpkins, and yeah – it’s pretty easy to imagine mid-90s MTV falling head over heels for it but in terms of fitting on OK Computer, it may have been somewhat of a parakeet in a cage of cockatiels.

But hang on, there’s more. For the utterly besotted there’s the now-customary “Super Deluxe” version, complete with a lavishly illustrated book and a C90 cassette, the contents of which appear to have gone under the radar in the run up to this release. It’s been described, with typical understatement, as a “mix of session archives”, suggesting it’s strictly for the hardcore.

And initially it feels that way; dizzying bleeps, studio found sounds, pretty but inconsequential doodling about – the sort of thing that completists listen to once and then file away. But about seven minutes in a version of Let Down emerges from the bluster, all campfire-like acoustic guitars and double-tracked, resigned and vulnerable vocals from Yorke. It suggests that the song was brought to the sessions fully-formed and is so strong that lesser bands may have left it that way, that they didn’t only emphasises the invention and wit poured into the arrangement of the final version.

Next comes a genuine surprise and a song that doesn’t appear to have previously surfaced online, despite the forensic approach that Radiohead enthusiasts take to the shadowy corners of their career. It begins in a chirpy fashion, with bah-bahs not a million miles from Bacharach’s I Can’t Take My Eyes Off You or The Beach Boys’ I’d Love Just Once To See You, before Yorke coos sweetly about “the joy of the uprising” and a “brief release of some hope”. On this showing it’s not quite an unreleased classic but fans will need to hear it

The collage-like nature of the tape continues: sound effects that do a decent job of mimicking a slow-motion explosion; chilling strings that sound like precursors to Jonny Greenwood’s work on There Will Be Blood; Yorke attempting to outscream Frank Black through a fuzz pedal. And then a moment that totally stops you in your tracks – a minimal, piano and voice take on Motion Picture Soundtrack, later reworked as the closing track on Kid A. Yorke sounds mere millimetres from the mic, investing the performance with goosebump-inducing intimacy. To these ears it’s one of the performances of his career, he begins sounding utterly wounded until – as if revelling in the places his voice is capable of taking the song – it ends up becoming something quite defiant.

The remainder of the first half is taken up with what sounds like a young girl reading an expanded version of the nightmarish Climbing Up The Walls lyric that is creepy beyond belief; revealing insights into the creation of the Karma Police refrain; a Herzog-like short story on the wonders and potential terror of nature read in the Fitter Happier voice; an acoustic No Surprises with alternate lyrics and a stripped-back Talk Show Host with totally different lyrics that feels like the disconsolate sibling of the more adventurous version that saw the light of day.

The revelations keep on coming on the second side of the cassette. We’re treated to an early version of Climbing Up The Walls with a brilliantly detached vocal from Yorke over an arrangement that leans much more prominently towards the skeletal beats’n’bass of the trip-hop acts who were making a stir a little further West. There are a series of rough demos and what sounds like soundboard recordings of various sections of Paranoid Android in the first flushes of development (magnificently wigged-out, whirling dervish-style organ solo, come on down!) and a bare-bones take on Airbag, again featuring embryonic lyrics.

There’s another heart-stopping moment for the faithful with a studio demo of Big Ideas, later released on In Rainbows as Nude, a title that may have puzzled listeners – not anymore, as it’s revealed the original chorus was “What do you look like, when you’re nude?” It veers off in unexpected directions as the band look to explore the song – again, the organ takes a pummelling with what’s presumably Jonny Greenwood adding a prog-goes-to-the-fairground feel to one of the instrumental breaks. Though Yorke doesn’t seem to have settled on the final lyrics, he absolutely sings the hell out of what he’s got.

As far as insights into the Radiohead creative process come, the most telling thing here might be the least successful. While in its Kid A form, The National Anthem is a pulsing, bass-driven thing that builds to a hysterical, thrilling free-jazz blowout, an early version here reveals that it could very easily have resembled the sort of latterday U2 track chosen to soundtrack Goal Of The Month reels. The lead guitar lines are unsettlingly reminiscent of the sort of thing that snugly denim-clad men who really should know better might “crank out” when trying out a new guitar in an attempt to impress an unfeasibly bored music shop attendant. It’s very un-Radiohead. But halfway through, that lead line eases off, a more unsettling part becomes more prominent, as does the bass, and we see the potential of the song. That Radiohead had the self-awareness to sit on it, rather than go for the drive-time jugular says so much about their intuitive good taste, and the prolonged success it would bring them.