Com Lag: 2plus2isfive

this compilation is for japan

Radiohead's Japanese label had marked two earlier visits with records of their own. Toshiba-EMI made Itch for the first tour in 1994 and No Surprises / Running From Demons for the third, and in January 2004 a third tour CD was announced, out on 24 March, three weeks before two nights at Intex Osaka and two at Makuhari Messe outside Tokyo. The Japanese listing called it a limited edition to mark the visit. The front of the digipak says it more plainly, in English, under the band's name: “This compilation is for Japan.”

Australia nearly got something else. EMI Australia had put a tour EP built around “A Punchup at a Wedding” on its release list, and was not given permission to release it there alone. It took Com Lag instead and released it on 19 April, four days before the first of the Sydney shows.

ten leftovers and a film

Nine of the ten tracks had already come out in Britain, as B-sides of the three singles from Hail to the Thief: “There There”, “Go to Sleep” and “2 + 2 = 5”. The sleeve splits them by who made them. Five were produced by Nigel Godrich and the band with Darrell Thorp engineering, the team from the album's sessions, among them a Los Angeles take of “I Will” and the two remixes, Cristian Vogel's “Remyxomatosis” and Four Tet's “Skttrbrain”. “I Am a Wicked Child”, “Gagging Order” and “Where Bluebirds Fly” were produced by the band and engineered by Graeme Stewart. On the 2003 tour “Where Bluebirds Fly” was the tape they walked on to.

Two are live. “Fog (Again)” is the Amnesiac B-side redone at the piano, taped for the French television programme Music Planet 2nite at Le Réservoir in Paris on 3 July 2003. The opener, and the one track nobody had, is “2 + 2 = 5” from Earls Court on 26 November 2003, the first of two nights there, recorded by Godrich. The enhanced part of the disc carries a film of the same song from the Eurockéennes festival at Belfort, the night after Paris.

delftware

Stanley Donwood vouched for the cover in March, after it first turned up on a fan site. The designers, he said, had imagined a range of Delft pottery painted with despots shaped like sperm and with bears that had been genetically modified, and the packaging would have a shiny varnish like a glaze.

I would like to make an entire range: tea pot, gravy boat etc.

stanley donwood · at ease, march 2004

On the front, under a blue engraved landscape of crags and a domed building, a bear marked MB stands at a brick wall working an old bellows camera on a tripod. Its subject, marked DSPT, grins back with a mouthful of teeth, and a speech bubble in Japanese says “はい、チーズ”, say cheese. On the back the running order is written across a French map of the Caspian Sea, and the subject has his name in full, DESPOT, and something to say.

I travelled all over the world. I stayed in the best hotels, visited the best beaches and had access to beautiful women, champagne and caviar.

the despot · com lag, back cover, 2004

He does not regret a minute of it. Inside, Death arrives with his scythe over a blue engraved palace, early, and says so; a banner reads “EXEUNT OMNES HA HA”; and a paragraph in pig Latin begins by announcing that there is no such thing as success. The credits say the decorations “were Executed by Mr. Stanley Donwood & Dr. Tchock”, set in a typeface called Tribute from Emigre, and credit a remixer called ForTet. The Japanese liner notes are by Soichiro Tanaka of the magazine Snoozer, dated February 2004.

Hi there. I had a window in my schedule, so I thought I'd pop by a few years early.

death · com lag, booklet, 2004

the hiss

The first Japanese pressing had a burst of digital noise running through “Skttrbrain” from three seconds in. Toshiba-EMI said at first that it would not recall the discs. Chris Ott of Pitchfork, who left the fault out of his score, called the faulty copies “basically a bad burn”, and in Paste Jeff Elbel wrote that the noise had scared his kindergartner out of the room. Later copies were clean.

Those clean copies travelled. Capitol in Canada moved its release from 13 April to 4 May to wait for them, and imports reached Mexico, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and, by August, Brazil. In Britain enough came in for Com Lag to enter the albums chart at number 37 in May, the week Keane went to number one. It reached 48 in Canada on imports alone, 25 in Japan, and was certified gold there.

Anthony Thornton gave it seven out of ten in NME, rated the live “2 + 2 = 5” above anything on I Might Be Wrong, and wrote that with the EMI contract done, this might be Radiohead's last full-length release on a major label. Daryl Goh in Malaysia's The Star called it the swansong of the EMI years, and warned readers that Japanese tour records came at Japanese prices, though EMI Malaysia had brought in limited stocks. Peter Menocal in Defy thought it glued together to coincide with the tour, and still gave the band credit for treating B-sides as more than an obligation. Ott gave it 4.0 and thought the piano “Fog” and the acoustic “Gagging Order” at the end the best five minutes on it. Ott was right about the order, and the record gets better as it goes.

after japan

One copy found a use. The Australian drum and bass DJ Phil K bought the Japanese disc, cut a heavier edit of Vogel's “Remyxomatosis” with Andy Page and played it in his sets, and in 2005 wanted it on his Y4K compilation. Clearing it would have cost too much, and it stayed off.

Parlophone finally released it in Britain on 16 April 2007, with Capitol following in America on 8 May. It was the same enhanced disc, still telling British buyers on the front that the compilation was for Japan, though the credits now spelt Four Tet correctly. Drowned in Sound found out it was out from Amazon. By then Radiohead had left EMI and were still making In Rainbows.

In 2009 EMI's Collector's Edition of Hail to the Thief put all ten tracks on its bonus disc, and XL reissued Com Lag as a download in 2016. In June 2020 the cover went on sale from W.A.S.T.E. as a 1,000-piece jigsaw, the Radiohead Fragmentary Time Waster, whose box warned that it would not be easy, and then that it would.