OK Computer is part of the shadow history of the ‘90s. In 1989, when everyone else was celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall, Leonard Cohen began writing a brutally bleak prophecy that he eventually christened ‘The Future’; its working title was If You Could See What’s Coming Next. OK Computer played a similarly sobering role in 1997 with Yorke, like Cohen, the buzzkill at the feast. History, sadly, has proven the buzzkills right.

In his book The Age of Extremes, which influenced OK Computer in general and Climbing Up the Walls in particular, the historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote: “As the citizens of the fin de siècle tapped their way through the global fog that surrounded them, into the third millennium, all they knew for certain was that an era of history had ended. They knew very little else.” What a perfect way to describe OK Computer — tapping its way through the global fog.

‘The eeriness of the everyday’

For all its grim preoccupations, however, OK Computer is not a depressing record. The music is more often than not exceedingly beautiful, even if the beauty often carries sinister undertones. Its emotional range extends to moments of temporary elation such as the back-from-the-dead triumphalism of Lucky and Airbag. And there’s a considerable amount of humour. The band have described aspects of Karma Police, Paranoid Android and Subterranean Homesick Alien as jokes — quoting Douglas Adams and punning on Bob Dylan is one way to puncture the darkness. The forthcoming reissue includes the first studio recording of fan favourite Lift, in which Yorke, rescued from an elevator, tells himself to “Lighten up, squirt”. Like the coda of Karma Police (“Phew, for a minute there I lost myself”) it shows that Yorke wasn’t above making fun of his own pessimism.