The Best Of

the button

Radiohead's EMI contract ran out with Hail to the Thief in 2003, and when the label tried to sign them again in 2007, its new owner, Guy Hands of Terra Firma, would not talk about giving the old records back. By February 2008 In Rainbows was out on XL, EMI had already boxed up the back catalogue for Christmas, and a greatest hits was on the way.

Ed O'Brien heard about it before most people. He told the Canadian programme Radio Show that EMI were planning one for April or May, to land on top of the band's tour. Phil Selway, asked by Analogue, said it was well within the label's rights, and that they would have to see.

We won't be doing any promotion for that, obviously.

ed o'brien · radio show, february 2008

Hands told his side to Eamonn Forde of The Guardian in 2019. EMI's finance department had shown him what a compilation and reissues would make, and he had put them on hold while the talks with the band were alive. When the talks died, with a bank staring EMI down and the band, as he saw it, humiliating the label in public, he pushed the button himself.

I don't think we have a huge amount of reasons to be nice to them.

guy hands · the guardian, 18 february 2019

sixteen, seventeen or thirty

Parlophone announced the record on 2 April. In Britain it came as a single disc of 16 songs and a special edition that added a second disc of 13, with a set of four LPs and a download. Capitol's American single disc had 17, the extra one an edit of “Optimistic”, which gave Kid A, an album with no singles, three songs on a hits record. EMI Music Japan beat everyone to the shops on 28 May and put “You and Whose Army?” on both its editions, with a separate booklet of translations; the double added the set lists of the band's Japanese tours from 1994 to 2004.

Disc one opens on “Just” and closes on “Everything in Its Right Place”, and ten of its 16 songs come from The Bends and OK Computer. The rare things are at the end of disc two: “Talk Show Host”, the 1996 B-side of “Street Spirit”, and the solo “True Love Waits” recorded in Oslo in September 2001 for I Might Be Wrong, then the only version of that song on any record. Scott Plagenhoef noticed in Pitchfork that disc two starts with “Airbag” and “I Might Be Wrong”, which happened to be the title tracks of the two mini-albums Capitol still had in the shops. Spin had one question about the track list, and it was why “Anyone Can Play Guitar”.

A DVD of the same name gathered 21 promo films, from “Creep” to “Sit Down. Stand Up”, with both the British and the American “High and Dry”, nine films that had never been on DVD, and “2 + 2 = 5” filmed at the Belfort festival in 2003. There were no extras of any kind.

the handshake

The cover is the pair of stick figures shaking hands that Stanley Donwood had put in the OK Computer booklet and on its disc, one of them carrying a briefcase, cut out and filled with vertical strips of colour. Thom Yorke's own reading of that drawing was a sale to someone who did not want what they were sold, and here it is on the front of the hits. The single disc came in black and the double in white, the vinyl box in black again.

The credits say design by Traffic, based on original artwork by Donwood and Tchock, with photographs by Tom Sheehan and Danny Clinch; Geoff Pesche mastered the compilation at Abbey Road. The booklet runs to a career essay by Chris Salmon, dated March 2008, which places the OK Computer sessions in “Jayne” Seymour's house and gives it six toilets. Yorke had counted twenty. Plagenhoef admitted in his review that he had not read the essay.

the wallpaper

Yorke said what he thought in The Word that May. The songs were public property now, he said, and there was nothing the band could do; if they had wanted to make one and been behind it, it might have been good, so it was a wasted opportunity. Leaving EMI, he said, was like moving house: you don't go back and look through the window at what the new people have done with the wallpaper.

We haven't really had any hits so what exactly is the purpose?

thom yorke · the word, may 2008

He used the same interview to accuse Hands's PR company of briefing against the band over money. Billboard had meanwhile reported that every format would be on sale at radioheadstore.com, the band's own shop, which was already selling EMI's box set.

number four

Parlophone released it in Britain on Monday 2 June and Capitol in America the next day, which was also the day the six EMI albums first went on iTunes a song at a time. In the week to 14 June it went in at number four, behind Paul Weller's 22 Dreams, Duffy and Neil Diamond; In Rainbows was at 98 that week. It went to number one in Ireland. On the Billboard 200 the single disc entered at 26, above In Rainbows at 71, and the double, counted separately, at 81. It was later certified platinum in Britain.

The reviews mostly liked the songs and wondered who the record was for. Martin Robinson, giving it four stars in NME, called it a low blow in answer to In Rainbows and guessed it would sell at Tesco. Plagenhoef gave the single disc 4.0 and the double 2.0, and said the songs themselves were a 10. Michael Keefe in PopMatters decided somebody at the label still loved the band. Uncut, reviewing the DVD, compared it to an abandoned spouse holding a jumble sale of a former partner's clothes, then gave most of its space to how good the videos are.

ten great songs, then none

EMI kept going. In 2009 it reissued the albums as Collector's Editions without asking the band, and cut The Best Of down to ten songs for its 10 Great Songs series. Warner bought Parlophone in 2013 and kept the compilation in print, and in April 2016, when the early catalogue passed to XL, it was taken off Spotify along with EMI's deluxe editions of the albums. NME still put it 12th among the greatest best-of albums in 2019, as a foolproof run through the Bends and OK Computer years.

The Warner pressing of the double gives the third song on disc two as “Go to Sleeo”.