Airbag / How Am I Driving?

the b-sides america never had

Parlophone put out three singles from OK Computer in Britain, and between them they carried eight songs that were not on the album. Capitol took six of them, none of which had been released in America, put “Airbag” in front, and released the seven on Tuesday 21 April 1998, in the United States and Canada, as what the front calls a mini album.

The B-sides came from both CDs of “Paranoid Android”, from “Karma Police” and from “No Surprises”, which had been out in Britain since January. Two were left behind: “Lull”, the other “Karma Police” B-side, and the short piano piece “How I Made My Millions”. So were the live “Airbag” from Berlin and “Lucky” from Florence on the second “No Surprises” CD. “Pearly” is the original mix, which fades out, not the cleaner one Toshiba-EMI had put on the Japanese No Surprises / Running From Demons* four months earlier. “Airbag” ends cold here, instead of running into “Paranoid Android”.

The back says as much. The first track is from the compact disc and cassette OK Computer, and tracks two to seven are “previously unreleased”, which was true enough at 1750 Vine Street, Hollywood, the address printed underneath. Jack Rabid, reviewing it for AllMusic, put the whole thing down to a label that wanted something new to sell with the next album two years away.

a quality product from radiohead

The front is white, boxed in heavy black rules like a form. Under the band's name and the title comes a ten-digit number, 1426148550, and then the line that gives the record its job.

This mini album is aimed at the USA.

the front cover · airbag / how am i driving?, 1998

Below it is a rough drawing of an empty room, an arrow pointing down at a black shape on the floor, captioned in two boxes: whoever it is has to lie in the middle of the floor without daring to breathe, and is like that when the police find them. At the right edge, half off the cover, are the blue X, the little figures and the trainer from the OK Computer artwork. NME reported in 2011 that the number was a pager, and that whoever rang it heard Yorke say hello.

The back explains the room. The front's two captions are the end of a story handwritten down the left side in a scrawl, with drawings: a flat toppling at the top of a block, builders in the distance saying “Look out!”, a pressure cooker smelling so bad the neighbours complain. Under it is a fax machine's power failure report listing the memory it lost. The credits are the usual two lines, the songs “committed to tape by Nigel Godrich” and the packaging by “Donwood&Chocolate”, Stanley Donwood and Yorke as The White Chocolate Farm, and then one more line.

Why visit www.radiohead.com when you can go for a stroll in the sunshine instead?

the back cover · airbag / how am i driving?, 1998

The booklet glued inside has no lyrics. It is a questionnaire.

Thank you for choosing this quality product from Radiohead. Please help us to help you by filling in this questionnaire.

the booklet · airbag / how am i driving?, 1998

Page after page of empty tick boxes follow, each beside a phrase: “Uniforms. With your name on.”, “We plants are happy plants.”, “Oxygen should be regarded as a drug.” Between them are two three-dimensional bar charts, one headed “Adventure frightens me” and one “Awareness by social class”, each with a slogan underneath, and two short stories, “Chip Shop” and “New Job”, told in the deadpan first person of the “small thoughts” the band's website was carrying that winter. In “New Job” the narrator dresses, adjusts his tie and walks out of the door before remembering he does not have a new job. The last page is a passage from The Chomsky Reader about the star system and the captain everyone hopes is steering the ship. The tray the disc sits in is white.

three days after radio city

It came out just after the American tour, not during it. The North American leg had opened in Houston on 28 March and ended with two nights at Radio City Music Hall in New York on 17 and 18 April, and Airbag / How Am I Driving? was in the shops the following Tuesday. On the day of the last show Robert Hilburn's review ran in the Los Angeles Times.

Billboard listed it at $8.98 on CD, against $15.98 for OK Computer. It went in at number 56 on the Billboard 200, on 20,000 copies in its first week by MTV's count, then fell to 94 and 176. In Canada it entered the SoundScan chart at number 12. Imported copies made the Scottish albums chart, six weeks from 2 May with a best of number 14.

four verdicts

Hilburn gave it four stars out of four. Careful bands, he argued, hold their B-sides to the standard of their albums, and these were mostly sound and atmosphere, with the words to “Pearly” and “Melatonin” less important than the layers under them. He finished by rating Radiohead above every rock band to emerge since U2. Ryan Schreiber at Pitchfork gave it 9.2, called “Polyethylene” one of the great non-album tracks, and could not understand how “Palo Alto” had not made OK Computer*, let alone been its first single.

Rob Brunner in Entertainment Weekly gave it a B. He had hoped for an OK Computer upgrade, thought “Pearly*” and “A Reminder” fell short of the album, and dismissed “Meeting in the Aisle” as a throwaway. Rabid at AllMusic gave it four stars out of five on the opposite reasoning: Radiohead judged their own material well, never left off a song that belonged on the album, and their lesser songs were still worth having. He heard the Kinks' “You Really Got Me” in the guitar of “Palo Alto”, told readers who had skipped the expensive British singles to buy this, and booed the absence of “Lull” and “How I Made My Millions”.

Brunner's review has aged worst. When Rolling Stone picked twenty Radiohead songs only hardcore fans know in 2016, two of them were “Palo Alto” and “Polyethylene”.

a grammy for the leftovers

On 6 January 1999 the Recording Academy nominated it for Best Alternative Music Performance, the category OK Computer had won the year before. Twenty-five minutes, most of it B-sides, was up against four full albums: the Beastie Boys' Hello Nasty, Tori Amos's From the Choirgirl Hotel, PJ Harvey's Is This Desire? and the Smashing Pumpkins' Adore. The Beastie Boys won, at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles on 24 February.

By December 2001, when MTV looked back at it beside I Might Be Wrong, it had sold more than 157,000 copies and was out of print in America. Capitol later pressed it again under the same catalogue number. When the Japanese Com Lag arrived in 2004, the reviews measured it against this one: Malaysia's The Star called this the rare American B-sides import, and Andy Kellman at AllMusic thought Com Lag's B-sides the weaker set.

OKNOTOK put all eight OK Computer B-sides together in 2017, “Lull” and “How I Made My Millions” included, nineteen years after Rabid booed their absence.