Radiohead have played most of their next album live, a fan magazine reckons

Radiohead spent the autumn recording most of their third album and meant to mix it in November and December, the fourth issue of Radiohead World Service reports. Many of the new songs were tried out on the Alanis Morissette tour. The UK fan magazine, edited by Paul Prentice and Suw Charman, reckons at least three-quarters of the album has already been played live.

The gig reports bear that out. Charman heard “Electioneering”, “Lift” and “I Promise” at La Cigale in Paris in April, and Richard Foster's set list from the Bataclan in May runs to 20 songs with “Airbag” in the first encore. Charlie Ryland saw “Paranoid Android” in a two-hour set at the Zodiac in Oxford on 2 July, a night without “Creep”. Nine days later at the Manchester Apollo, Kim O'Neill writes, Jonny and Colin Greenwood and Ed O'Brien coaxed Thom Yorke into playing it.

The rest is mostly reprinted. In a Seattle radio interview from March 1996, O'Brien says the third album could come out that September or in 1998, with no deadline set. Jim Shelley's Guardian feature from July goes back to the band's loss of nerve before they recorded The Bends.

We were scared of our instruments, scared of every note not being right.

Jonny Greenwood¹

The 1996 shows reviewed in the issue