I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings

the human element

Kid A and Amnesiac were built up in the studio a layer at a time, and Radiohead spent the year after the first of them working out how to play the songs to a field of people. By the summer of 2001 they had stopped trying to copy the records. Phil Selway told Rolling Stone that the new songs had come alive once they took them on stage.

In the past, what we'd done onstage was a Xerox copy of what's been on our records.

phil selway · rolling stone, 21 june 2001

Ed O'Brien, in the same piece, said a faithful Kid A would have had to be an art installation, and that live they put the human element back in. Thom Yorke came back to it two years later with David Fricke: the electronics could be played too, and what interested him was the friction between the people and the machines.

It was the tension between what's human and what's coming from the machines.

thom yorke · rolling stone, 26 june 2003

The man at the desk in the middle of the crowd was Jim Warren, the band's front-of-house engineer since before they had a record deal. He mixed half of I Might Be Wrong, and in 2008 he described his approach to Mix magazine in terms the band would recognise.

There's a few bits and pieces where I've gone beyond the realms of good taste, which is what the band frequently does anyway.

jim warren · mix, 1 october 2008

four nights on tape

The record opens in a Roman theatre. “The National Anthem” and “Everything in Its Right Place” come from the Théâtre antique at Vaison-la-Romaine in Provence on 28 May, a week before Amnesiac was in British shops. EMI France's trade flyer for the album promised that night live by satellite in 30 French cities. Twenty years later, for Amnesiac's 20th birthday, the band put their film of the whole show on YouTube.

Four songs are from the homecoming in South Park, Oxford, on 7 July: “I Might Be Wrong”, “Morning Bell”, “Idioteque” and “Dollars and Cents”. Those four were mixed by Nigel Godrich with William Shapland; Warren did the rest. “Like Spinning Plates”, rebuilt as a piano song, comes from America, from the Blossom Music Center at Cuyahoga Falls outside Cleveland on 8 August, the first night that arrangement is on file here. The Michigan Daily's reviewer spent the start of it stuck in traffic on a ninety-degree day. “True Love Waits” is Yorke alone with an acoustic guitar at the Oslo Spektrum on 9 September.

The band chose the takes themselves. Capitol said so in September, and added that there were no plans to say where any of them came from. The band's shop and the NME review name four cities, Oxford, Berlin, Oslo and Vaison-la-Romaine. Berlin is the odd one. Radiohead played the Parkbühne Wuhlheide there on 11 September 2001, the day of the attacks in America, and nothing on the record comes from that night. The track titles on today's digital edition name every show, and the one they add is Ohio.

the single that grew

It started as a single. On 5 September an unnamed spokesperson told NME that “I Might Be Wrong” would be the third single from Amnesiac, probably out on 5 November, and fan sites were already talking about eight tracks and “True Love Waits”. On 24 September Capitol confirmed an eight-song live record for 13 November, to be sold as a full-length CD. NME had the British date the next day: 12 November, on CD and as a 12-inch in a gatefold sleeve.

It reached Japan first, on 7 November, five weeks after the band's last show there. Parlophone released it in Britain on the 12th and Capitol in America the day after.

The sleeve is by Stanley Donwood and Dr Tchock, the name Yorke uses for his side of the artwork. A black tower block and a staircase are printed over stained brown paper, strings of paper polyhedra hang across it like lanterns, and a pencilled white creature with horns and a mouthful of teeth crouches in the corner. Down one of the strings, mirror-written on a typewriter, run the words “will you come back to me”. The band's name is in red on a black strip down the right-hand side.

better live, too short

The reviews mostly agreed with Selway. Ted Kessler in NME thought it sounded better than either of the studio albums it came from. Tom Moon gave it four stars in Rolling Stone, and heard a band whose live magic came from taking things away. Robert Wilonsky, who wrote in the Dallas Observer that he had not enjoyed a Radiohead record for fun since The Bends, found these versions as warm as the albums had been cold; the same review ran in Phoenix New Times a week later.

The complaint was the length. Stephen Thompson in The A.V. Club counted eight songs in 40 minutes and called the brevity inexplicable. Matt LeMay at Pitchfork gave it 8.0, thought it a shadow of what a Radiohead live album could have been, and signed off by congratulating Yorke on getting people to pay $17.99 for eight songs. Matt Galloway in Toronto's NOW called it a cash-in.

He had a point about the shape, if not the motive. The 2001 sets ran to 22 or 23 songs most nights, and the record keeps eight, all but one from the last two albums. The playing makes it worth having, and the playing is also why it should have been twice as long.

It reached number 23 in Britain and 44 on the Billboard 200, and was later certified silver in Britain. By 2016 it had sold 298,000 copies in America. In 2003 Rolling Stone, ranking Radiohead second only to U2 among live bands, named it their best live album.

after the encore

Until A Moon Shaped Pool in 2016, the last track on it was the only “True Love Waits” the band had released. EMI put the record in the Radiohead Box in 2007 as its seventh disc, and in 2009 its Collector's Editions took “True Love Waits” for the bonus disc of Kid A and the piano “Like Spinning Plates” for Amnesiac's. XL reissued it on vinyl in 2016 with the rest of the catalogue.

Radiohead did not release another live album until Hail to the Thief (Live Recordings 2003–2009) in 2025, and Justin Vellichi of Spectrum Culture rated that one above this, on the sound alone. In 2005 Anderson Cooper of CNN told Blender that I Might Be Wrong was the album he did not understand.