MINIDISCS [HACKED]

sounds + ideas

Thom Yorke kept an archive of MiniDiscs from the years of OK Computer: rehearsals, soundchecks, shows, songs sung alone, bits of television and the hum of a fridge. Eighteen of the discs, numbered on white stickers from MD111 to MD128, are this record. Each one is a single track, about an hour long, and the release has no song titles at all. What it has instead is the labels.

They are in Yorke's hand, mostly on Sony and TDK cards, and most are headed “sounds + ideas” or “songs + ideas” with a number in a circle and the word “sampled”. Some are dated. MD124, “soundcheck U.S.A.”, carries “10-4-96” and an arrow, the date of the 9:30 Club in Washington, and its list runs through “airbag (dc)”, “lift (cleveland)” and “manhattan dogs”. One from 19 April 1996, two days after a show at Villeurbanne, outside Lyon, lists “no surprises please (Lyon)” and, at the bottom, “amazing drums for exit music”. Another says “pittsburg 27-8-96” beside “Karma Police”, “Paranoid Android” and “Let Down”, a night on the Alanis Morissette tour, at Star Lake outside Pittsburgh. One is written on a sticker meant for a VHS tape. MD121 lists “Stockhausen voices” and “mad laugh - Rashomon”. MD125 lists album songs, a “Lift” with clean vocals and another with distorted ones, and one mix marked “nigels master”. MD126, a turquoise Maxell, says only “finished mixes”. MD128 has no label at all.

The working titles are half the fun. “Exit Music (For a Film)” is “poison” on the first disc, “Attention” is spelled “attenzione!”, and “No Surprises” keeps a “please” on the end of it through several discs.

i promise, fourteen times

The discs hold the OK Computer songs in every state between a hummed idea and the master, and a good deal that never got near the album. Rolling Stone counted “I Promise” 14 times. The Guardian found nine versions of “Lift” and a garage version of “Paranoid Android” that runs to 11 minutes, with Yorke singing “hallelujah” where the album has wordless cries. There is a full-band “True Love Waits”, a full-band “Motion Picture Soundtrack” years before Kid A had one, and an early “Nude” with an organ. Yorke beatboxes, briefly.

The best moment belongs to “A Reminder”. Yorke sings it unaccompanied, out of doors with the wind across the microphone, after someone tells him “the whole mountain's yours”.

Not all of it was Radiohead. The leaked copies carried about 15 minutes of a James Bond score on MD116 and a 12-minute field recording on MD123; the band's release took out the Bond and cut MD123 from 51 minutes to 18. Some of the rest was already known, because the box of OKNOTOK in 2017 had come with a cassette drawn from the same discs.

zimbra

On 26 May 2019 someone calling themselves Zimbra joined a Radiohead fan group on Discord and began teasing unreleased OK Computer material. On 3 June a post on the band's subreddit warned that a leaker had 18 hours of it and wanted $150,000 for the lot, or $800 a studio track and $50 a live one. Zimbra later told Marc Hogan of Pitchfork that he had got the files by trading some unreleased Beatles, from an account using the name of a well-known Radiohead taper, and that the $150,000 had been a hypothetical figure tossed at one fan. On a forum for leaked rap music he had priced one of the “Lift”s at $500, reasoning that two minutes of Kanye West mumbling went for about $2,000; the fans did not see it that way. Within days a copy of more than 17 hours was posted for anyone to take, and the fans started a shared document mapping every disc.

Their response is for sure a very Radiohead-ish response.

zimbra · pitchfork, 12 june 2019

Hogan could not find out who had taken the discs in the first place. John Nicholas, who ran the fans' document, thought the most likely answer was that they had been digitised by an outside company for the OKNOTOK box and that somebody there had kept a copy.

In the situation we were placed in, it seemed that we were approaching something on the level of the Let It Be tapes.

john nicholas · pitchfork, 12 june 2019

eighteen days, eighteen pounds

The band answered on Tuesday 11 June. Jonny Greenwood posted a note titled “Walter Sobchack vs Bunny's toe”, after the ransom plot in The Big Lebowski: someone had stolen Thom's minidisk archive and reportedly demanded $150,000 not to release it, so instead they were releasing all of it themselves, on Bandcamp, for 18 days, with the money going to Extinction Rebellion. He warned that it was only tangentially interesting, very long and not a phone download, and signed off by asking whether it was rainy out.

So for £18 you can find out if we should have paid that ransom.

jonny greenwood · instagram, 11 june 2019

Yorke's note on the Bandcamp page is shorter, mostly in lower case and signed “Thmx”. It dates the discs to 1995 to 1998 with a question mark, and says that since it was out there it might as well be out there until everyone got bored and moved on. The page also warned buyers that the MP3s came to 1.8 gigabytes. Greenwood's 18 hours turned out to be 16 hours and 19 minutes.

it's not v interesting / there's a lot of it

thom yorke · bandcamp, 11 june 2019

Ben Sisario of The New York Times read Greenwood's “reportedly” to mean the band had never been asked for anything, and had only seen the rumour online. Extinction Rebellion thanked them the same day with a short film set to “Idioteque”, which the band had let them use.

the reviews

Most critics ignored the warnings and listened. Ben Beaumont-Thomas gave it four stars in The Guardian and told Yorke and Greenwood they were absolutely wrong about it. Ed Power, also four stars in The Telegraph, called it an 18-hour Black Mirror episode set inside Yorke's head. Darran Anderson heard all of it for The Quietus, walking in the woods in the rain, and doubted it could be reviewed at all, any more than film rushes or storyboards. Q thought the “Lift” alone was worth the £18.

Andrew Harrisson in the New Statesman thought the way it came out mattered more than what was on it. The same material as a remastered box of 17 discs would have come with the carbon cost of making and shipping it, which an environmental campaign would not have liked.

£500,000

The Bandcamp page was up until 29 June and gone the next day. The Guardian reported the following April that the eighteen days had raised roughly £500,000 for Extinction Rebellion, a good deal more than the $150,000 that nobody may ever have asked them for.