Only the “Kid A” mix is right, says Ed O'Brien as his diary returns

Ed O'Brien's studio diary on radiohead.com is back after six weeks, with three pieces posted at once, and in one of them a song called “Kid A” appears for the first time.

He did write up the gap, he explains, and threw it all away; a couple of essays written stoned late at night looked like pretentious nonsense in the morning.

The first piece is an undated note from London, written three days into Nigel Godrich's mixing, with six or so tracks finished. Over five weeks a list of about ten songs had come down to six, which O'Brien calls definitely different. On one of them an eight-piece brass ensemble played in the style of Charles Mingus.

eight ‘jazzers’ came down for the day and blew their stuff all over ‘everyone – the national anthem’. they were fantastic…………thom and jonny conducted. what a day.

Ed O'Brien²

The others he names are “Optimistic” and the “Morning Bell” from Batsford. O'Brien now thinks the summer panic that led to two months of rehearsal may have been a little hysterical, since the year's sessions in Paris, Copenhagen and Batsford Park all produced good material. The Copenhagen tracks have a great overall sound. pretty dark but then that session was hardly a chuckle-trousered affair.²

The week of Tuesday 23 November did not start well.

of those six songs that nigel mixed only one is right – kid a.

Ed O'Brien²

Godrich is fairly optimistic about the other five and knows what he wants to do with them. The band then met their managers, Chris Hufford and Bryce Edge, and O'Brien came away reminded how the industry works. A tour needs about five months' notice to book the venues and tell the crew. The band had not thought about touring at all. we want to do gigs,but we have to make this record – and then we don’t even know whether they’ll work as a live entity.²

Today Phil Selway laid down drums on “How to Disappear” for a demo to play to what O'Brien calls an orchestral fella. The band have kind of shied away from strings in the past, he writes, because they seem to have been recorded the same way for 30 years, ever since the Beatles. Jonny Greenwood above all wants an orchestra, used less like the usual cliché and more like the end of “Climbing Up the Walls”.

O'Brien calls Yorke's vocal on the demo jaw-dropping. Playing the song again felt very strange to him, since the band played it often on the OK Computer tour, stretching it to seven and ten minutes; suddenly they were back there.