Itch

a single that missed may

Radiohead came out of three months at RAK with John Leckie in the spring of 1994 with a set full of new songs and nothing ready to sell. The single they had promised fans for May was not finished, and their summer newsletter owned up to it.

sorry, we spilt coffee on it, no...the cat chewed the tape...erm...we left it on the bus

radiohead · w.a.s.t.e. 7, summer 1994

Their first trip to Japan was booked for early June, and Toshiba-EMI, EMI's Japanese arm, marked it with a record of its own. What came out on 1 June was Itch, eight tracks and 26 minutes, none of them new. The inlay calls it a “Japan Tour Mini Album”, and the obi, the paper strip Japanese CDs come wrapped in, shouts that it is on sale only in Japan.

the b-sides and the road

The sleeve is honest about where it all came from, track by track. The opener is the American single version of “Stop Whispering”, which Sean Slade and Paul Q. Kolderie produced and Chris Sheldon remixed, more than a minute shorter than the one on Pablo Honey. In America it had been the follow-up to “Creep” and stalled at number 23 on Billboard's modern rock chart. “Thinking About You” is the take from the Drill EP of 1992, produced by Chris Hufford, and the only track whose publishing is down as copyright control rather than Warner Chappell. “Faithless, the Wonder Boy”, the B-side of “Anyone Can Play Guitar”, is credited to James Warren and Hufford. The acoustic “Banana Co.” from the back of “Pop Is Dead” is credited, in full, to someone called 7.

The second half is the band on the road in America. JBTV, a Chicago music show, filmed them at the Metro on 30 June 1993, and “Killer Cars”, “Vegetable” and “You” come from that night: the song that opened the show, the fourth, and the first of the encore. The record ends on “Creep” played acoustically on KROQ in Los Angeles on 13 July, the day the band played the Hollywood Palladium. Those four had already been out once in Britain, on the limited 12-inch of the “Creep” reissue in September 1993, which Parlophone called the U.S. Live E.P.; Itch took the whole of it.

We had been going for over two years on the strength of one song.

thom yorke · billboard, 25 february 1995

The sleeve gives the acoustic “Creep” to Slade and Kolderie along with the opener. The notes inside say KROQ, and so does the 12-inch. It was not even new in Japan, where Toshiba-EMI had already put the KROQ take on its own “Creep” CD in 1993.

tanaka's notes

The obi sells Itch as a special mini-album from the members of Radiohead to their Japanese fans. The man who picked the songs was Soichiro Tanaka of rockin'on, the Tokyo music monthly, credited on the same strip with supervising the record and writing its notes. He dated them April 1994 and wrote them as an argument with himself, a dialogue in which one voice makes the other, the man who chose the songs, explain himself.

He reads the title two ways: an itch, and the restless waiting of Japanese fans who had been kept hanging since Pablo Honey came out in Britain in February 1993. He admits the running order leaves him with regrets. In an ideal world, he says, the whole of Drill would have gone on, but a mini-album has a time limit, a record for a tour needs live takes, and the new British single due at the end of May had not arrived in time. He introduces John Leckie as the producer who had run away from the Stone Roses' studio, and he spends most of his pages on what he thinks Radiohead are for: songs that accuse the American dream of getting ahead, written from the loser's side. In notes dated the month Kurt Cobain died, he names Yorke as Britain's answer to Cobain and says he will not be talked out of it. The lyrics follow, in English and in Makiko Saito's Japanese.

a confetti of r's

The sleeve carries no design credit, and it owes nothing to Stanley Donwood, who had not yet done a Radiohead cover. It takes one piece of the Pablo Honey art, the lower-case “r” in a black circle filled with hundreds and thousands, and multiplies it. Dozens of r's in red, green, blue and yellow discs crowd round the edges of a white square, overlapping like spilt sweets, with the band's name across the top in its ragged Pablo Honey type and ITCH in fat purple capitals lower down. The disc is printed lemon yellow with the name and title in pink, and the booklet's left-hand pages are a deep violet, the track list printed over one huge white “r”. The back of the case ends on the shop details: 2,000 yen and a date stamp, 94.6.1.

five nights in japan

The tour began at Club Quattro in Shibuya on 4 June and ended with two nights at Club Citta' in Kawasaki, the first of them filmed. In Tokyo the set opened with “You”, put “My Iron Lung” seventh, months before anyone could buy it, and closed with “Lurgee”. The band's newsletter that summer said the shows were packed, and that Phil Selway now had a fan club of his own.

Nobody was more impressed with Japan than Thom. He was lost in an ideal world where he towered over people and clothes fitted him.

radiohead · w.a.s.t.e. 7, summer 1994

Six of Itch's eight songs were in the Tokyo set, and “Killer Cars” turned up in Kawasaki. The same newsletter says they did well with Itch. It did not stay a Japanese record, whatever the obi said. EMI in New Zealand pressed it too, under its own catalogue number and with the same eight tracks.

seven of the eight

By November 1996 Record Collector was pricing it at £20 as a Japanese “tour souvenir”. The only later pressing is an unofficial one, from Russia in 2002.

The songs came home in pieces. EMI's 2009 Collector's Edition of Pablo Honey, made without the band, gathered the B-sides, the Drill tracks and the 1993 live takes on its second disc, and Pitchfork named the American “Stop Whispering” the best thing among them. Seven of Itch's eight tracks are on it, the Drill “Thinking About You” billed there as a demo. The one left out is the live “You”, the song that opened the first Radiohead show in Japan.