Lucky

above the nut

It began with a noise, at soundchecks in Japan on the tour behind The Bends. Ed O'Brien found he could get a high ringing note out of the strings above the nut of his guitar, and at the start of the song that is him strumming them with a nail file.

one day, five hours

Brian Eno wanted a track from them for The Help Album, a War Child record for children in Bosnia that was to be written, recorded and released inside a week. Everything had to be cut on 4 September 1995, and they did it in five hours with Nigel Godrich, who had engineered for John Leckie on The Bends and produced a few of their B-sides.

Those things are the most inspiring, when you do stuff really fast and there's nothing to lose. We left feeling fairly euphoric.

nigel godrich · the mix, august 1997

That session is what got Godrich OK Computer.

‘Lucky’ was indicative of what we wanted to do. It was like the first mark on the wall.

thom yorke · mojo, july 1997

released twice

It led the Help EP, which reached number 51 after Radio 1 declined to play it. Two years later the same recording went onto OK Computer as track eleven; the 2003 version of this site says they tried to remix it for the album and could not improve on it. It was meant to be a single from OK Computer too, and in the end was only pressed as one in France, in December 1997.

the opening song

Its first full-band night was in London, Ontario, on 24 July 1995, played acoustic in the encore, three days after Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood played it for the Atlanta radio station 99X. On the OK Computer tour it was often the song the band started with, and most of the forty-one nights it has opened are in 1997. When it opened at Nîmes on 10 July 2012 it was the first time since 1998.

It opened Rock Torhout in Belgium on 5 July 1997, in front of 30,000 people standing in deep mud. While it played, the people throwing the mud stopped and moved to the front.