KID A MNESIA

the box set in 20 years

Ed O'Brien saw this one coming. Asked by Channel 4's Planet Sound in 2001 why a second “Morning Bell” had turned up on Amnesiac, he said the band often recorded songs several ways, abandoned most of the versions halfway, and had simply forgotten that one.

We're saving them for our box set in 20 years when no one's interested in us anymore.

ed o'brien · planet sound, channel 4, 2001

He was right to the year. Kid A and Amnesiac were made in the same sessions and split in two because the band would not put out a double album; the story of that argument belongs to the two records. KID A MNESIA is the double album they would not make, released by XL on 5 November 2021 with a third disc, Kid Amnesiae, made from the same tapes. OK Computer had been through the same treatment in 2017 as OKNOTOK, and fans had been guessing at a Kid A set ever since.

The two original albums were not remastered. The discs carry Chris Blair's master of Kid A, made at Abbey Road in 2000, and Bob Ludwig's of Amnesiac, from Gateway in Maine, and the credits are the old ones down to Gerard Navarro as assistant to the directors. The one change is on the download, where the untitled coda at the end of Kid A gets a track number of its own: 52 seconds of it, after “Motion Picture Soundtrack”.

through the multitracks

Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood spent two years on the project, about as long as the band had spent making the records. Their part was the artwork, two books and an exhibition, and Yorke described the work to Rolling Stone as being sucked backwards through a hedge. Going back through the multitrack tapes turned up music as well as pictures. The best find was a version of “True Love Waits”, the ballad the band had been playing live since 1995 and would not record until 2016, sung over the machinery of “Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors”. In 2000 they had not been sure the pairing was right, and let it drop. Yorke had no memory of making it.

you find it 20 years later and go, ‘That's good.’

thom yorke · rolling stone, 3 november 2021

Kid Amnesiae runs 12 tracks and 34 minutes, and Nigel Godrich is credited as its producer. The band introduced it as “a memory palace of half-remembered, half-forgotten sessions & unreleased material”, which is fair. There is a piano “Like Spinning Plates”, subtitled “Why Us?”, nearer the piano version on I Might Be Wrong than the backwards one on Amnesiac. There are the Orchestra of St John's strings for “Pyramid Song” and “How to Disappear Completely” with the band taken away, John Lubbock conducting Jonny Greenwood's parts, and three short untitled sketches. “Fog” and “Fast Track”, two B-sides, come back in other takes; “Morning Bell”, the one song on both albums, gets a third version, instrumental and in the dark. Two had never been released in any form: “If You Say the Word”, a session track the band had shelved, and “Follow Me Around”, older than either album, which fans had chased since a soundcheck in Meeting People Is Easy.

taped back together

Radiohead had joined TikTok that April, where a character called Chieftain Mews posted on their behalf to little effect. On 3 September a sketch had Yorke and Donwood going over the account's figures in a boardroom. Donwood called them embarrassing, and Yorke reminded the Chieftain that it was not the 1990s any more.

Four days later a clip showed a pair of hands trying to tape CD copies of Kid A and Amnesiac together, to “Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box”. The set was announced later that day with “If You Say the Word” out as a single. Its video, by Kasper Häggström, followed on 23 September, and “Follow Me Around” came on 1 November with Guy Pearce in its video.

The press release called it the 21st anniversary of both records, and a good part of the press called it the 20th. It came on three CDs, three LPs in black or in red for independent shops, and a deluxe set of three half-speed-cut cream LPs bound into a 36-page hardback. The cassette edition was numbered to 5,000: two tapes in a buckram-covered box, with five B-sides of the period (“Kinetic”, “Fast-Track”, “Cuttooth”, “The Amazing Sounds of Orgy” and “Trans-Atlantic Drawl”) after Kid Amnesiae. The press release spelled it Kid Amnesiette; the box says KID A MNESIETTE. The deluxe LPs and the cassette were held up into 2022 by what the band's American shop called “many forces at work which are beyond our control at this time”, and their arrival put the set back into Billboard's Top Album Sales at number six that February.

The CD sleeve is a gatefold with two fronts: Kid A's mountains on one face and Amnesiac's red book on the other, each under the new title. Canongate published the artwork alongside it, a hardback catalogue of more than 300 pieces and Fear Stalks the Land!, a paperback of the faxes, notes and early lyrics that Yorke and Donwood sent each other in 1999 and 2000.

reviews and charts

Rob Sheffield gave it five stars in Rolling Stone, under the headline “Radiohead's finest hour sounds better than ever”. Jayson Greene at Pitchfork gave it 9.2, and found less on the third disc than on OKNOTOK's. Much of the session music had been traded on Napster since 2000, and “Follow Me Around” was already familiar from the film. Andrew Trendell reviewed Kid Amnesiae alone for NME and heard a complete album in it. In The Quietus Darran Anderson argued that the set's real use was to give Amnesiac equal footing with its famous twin. Paste gave it 5.5 and called the box unnecessary, and asked why the albums had been repackaged when they had not been remastered.

Our view is that Kid Amnesiae is a sketchbook, worth having and easy to overrate. What earns the set its place is that, 21 years on, the two records run into each other as one long piece of work, the way the band would not sell them in 2000.

It went into the British chart at number four in the week ABBA's Voyage went in at number one, and topped the Official Record Store Chart. In Ireland it reached number three, and in America number 12 on the Billboard 200.

not a game

The exhibition was meant to be a building. Yorke and Donwood planned a red structure of welded shipping containers that would look as if a brutalist spacecraft had crash-landed into the Victoria and Albert Museum, then travel to New York, Tokyo and Paris.

This astounding steel carapace would be inserted into the urban fabric of London like an ice pick into Trotsky.

thom yorke and stanley donwood · playstation blog, 18 november 2021

It would not fit the V&A without parts of the museum falling down. They moved it to the side of the Royal Albert Hall, Westminster council refused, and then the pandemic finished it. So the KID A MNESIA EXHIBITION became software, built over two years with the director Sean Evans, the set designer Christine Jones, Matthew Davis's studio [namethemachine] and Arbitrarily Good Productions, with Godrich building the sound from the original multitracks. Sony showed it at its PlayStation Showcase on 9 September, and Epic Games put it out free on 18 November for PlayStation 5, PC and Mac. Jones went on to co-direct Hamlet Hail to the Thief, the stage show that sent Yorke back to the band's live tapes. The building did arrive in the end, in 2026, as the touring Motion Picture House.

A sign at the door of the exhibition says it is not a game. Simon Parkin put it on The New Yorker's list of the best video games of 2021 anyway, and decided that since nothing in it happens without a player, it is one.