Lurgee

the older take

By the account Mojo gave in 1997, EMI had two songs in mind for a first single, “Inside My Head” and this one; Paul Kolderie, telling it to Mix in 2025, remembered the second as “Million Dollar Question”. He and Sean Slade spent the first days at Chipping Norton trying to get one of them right, with a band Kolderie remembered as desperately inexperienced, and got neither; what they got, from the band playing between attempts, was “Creep”.

The band never liked the version of this song they made with Slade and Kolderie, so for the album they went back to an earlier recording made with Chris Hufford at Courtyard Studios, which he co-owned. The Pablo Honey booklet credits every track to Chipping Norton except two Courtyard recordings produced by Hufford, this one and “I Can't”. The same take had already been the B-side of the first “Creep” single on 21 September 1992, second of four tracks. It ends in a long, unhurried solo that Annie Zaleski, in Salon, found meandering, and in February 2007 Q put it with “Blow Out” in its “500 Greatest Lost Tracks”.

back on the ok computer tour

The archive has it on 110 nights, starting at the Duchess of York in Leeds on 27 October 1992, and 1993 was its busiest year. The OK Computer tour brought it back, for twenty-three nights in 1997 and twenty-one in 1998. At the fan-club show at the London Astoria in September 1997 Mat Smith of NME heard it in what he called a cyber-country arrangement.

At the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco on 2 April 1998 it was the last song of the night, a second encore on its own. Eric Hellweg, reviewing for Rolling Stone, had found almost nothing from Pablo Honey in the set, and wrote it up as another new song, a fast one. Eight nights later, at the Rosemont Theatre outside Chicago, with “Creep” left out, it was the only first-album song of the night, and Thom Yorke said where it came from.

we didn't know what we were doing… it's called learning

thom yorke · rosemont theatre, 10 april 1998

It was the only Pablo Honey song at Radio City Music Hall eight days after that, and then it went quiet for 789 days, until the Teatro Tivoli in Barcelona on 15 June 2000.

the second american leg

It turned up four times in 2003, all on the second North American leg. At Shoreline Amphitheatre on 23 September Yorke had just said they didn't often play songs from the first record, and the treefingers.com desk wrote down what he said next.

There are many reasons for this. Not gonna tell you any of 'em.

thom yorke · shoreline amphitheatre, 23 september 2003

In Houston on 1 October the Houston Chronicle's reviewer heard in it an early sketch of the later lullabies, “No Surprises” among them. It closed two shows over the years, and the latest night on file is Madison Square Garden on 9 October 2003.

the lurgy

The lurgy, in British slang, is whatever vague illness someone has caught and is now shaking off. The song is about getting over a person told as getting over a bug, the singer telling himself he is better and stronger now the other one has gone. The 2003 version of this site, which ran in English and Slovak, spelt out the pronunciation for readers who had never heard the word: “L-er-gh-ee”.