Song · Kid A / Amnesiac era (2000–01)
Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box
When the 2003 version of this site asked its readers for their favourite Amnesiac song, this one won.
Amnesiacalbum- 2001released
- 4:00length
2000
thom's laptop
Three weeks before Amnesiac came out, Colin Greenwood sat down at EMI's Brook Green offices in London with Kodwo Eshun for an A to Z interview, and D was for distortion.
The kkkurrghh from Packt Like Sardines, that's from Thom's laptop.
colin greenwood · culture lab, may 2001
The band had compressed loops that had gone wrong and kept them. Further down the alphabet Colin said the fuzz bass he plays on it, and on “Exit Music (For a Film)”, comes from his love of the bass player in Curtis Mayfield's band.
The voice was treated too. Simon Reynolds, interviewing Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood for The Wire in July 2001, reported that they ran the vocal through Auto-Tune, the pitch-correction software, for a nasal sound with the person taken out of it.
2001
the dial tone
It opens the record, and David Fricke's Rolling Stone preview of 24 May 2001 joked that American fans putting it on might wonder whether they had got a dial tone, what with the clanging percussion and a pulse that builds into a smear of synth noise. Once Yorke comes in, though, the words are clear and irritated, which Fricke took for the break from Kid A. Ed O'Brien told him the new album put the vocals up front so that the songs would grab people.
Jon Pareles, in the same magazine five days later, heard a man going over a wasted life, set to a would-be dance record crushed down to small metallic noises and then spoiled on purpose with dissonance.
Alexis Petridis in The Guardian on 1 June set the two albums' openers side by side and chose this one by a distance, dismissing “Everything in Its Right Place” as a doodle and praising this one for its bite and its paranoia. He also noted that Yorke had lately implied he was being watched by MI5. Fans came round to the same view: in January 2003 a poll on the old version of this site made it their favourite song on the record, with 41 votes.
2001
funk at bray
Before the American tour the band ran through nearly 30 songs on a soundstage at Bray Studios, and Fricke was there. On that stage the quiet record grew into something close to funk, a krautrock groove with Stones-style guitar crashing over it.
It had first been played in a Canal+ television studio in Paris on 28 April 2001, and it went round 26 nights that year. After the Parkbühne Wuhlheide in Berlin on 11 September 2001 it was gone for 3,838 days, more than ten years, and came back for a single night in Glendale on 15 March 2012.
on stage
Live at Glendale Arizona 3/15/12.· CWhippwatch on youtube →
the record(1)
on stage(6)
Live history
| Times played | 27 shows |
|---|---|
| Live debut | Saturday 28 April 2001 · Paris |
| Last played | Thursday 15 March 2012 · Glendale |
| Longest absence | 10 years · back on Thursday 15 March 2012 · Glendale |
Nights played include broadcasts; opened and closed count gigs only. A cancelled night has no setlist. All setlist stats →
Tabs (1)
sources8
- Kodwo Eshun, “The A–Z of Radiohead” (interview with Colin Greenwood), Culture Lab, British Council, May 2001, for the laptop noise and the fuzz bass.
- Wikipedia, “Amnesiac (album)”, for Simon Reynolds, “Walking on thin ice”, The Wire, July 2001, on the Auto-Tune vocal.
- David Fricke, “Radiohead warm up with Amnesiac”, Rolling Stone, 24 May 2001, for the dial tone and O'Brien on the vocals.
- David Fricke, “Radiohead: making music that matters”, Rolling Stone, 2 August 2001, for the Bray rehearsal.
- Jon Pareles, review of Amnesiac, Rolling Stone, 29 May 2001.
- Alexis Petridis, “Relax: it's nothing like Kid A”, The Guardian, 1 June 2001.
- The 2003 site's January 2003 poll for favourite Amnesiac song, which it won with 41 votes.
- Performance dates from this site's own setlist archive.