Pawel Osmolski gives “Big Ideas” and “Follow Me Around” a full band

Pawel Osmolski, a fan, has made full-band versions of two unreleased Radiohead songs, “Follow Me Around” and “Big Ideas (Don't Get Any)”, keeping Thom Yorke's voice and guitar from live recordings and playing everything else himself. NME picked the mixes up on 27 May and says the band know nothing about them. Both can be downloaded from the fan site At Ease.

Seeing as it seems unlikely that Radiohead would put these tracks out, I took the initiative to try and recreate them from live performances.

Pawel Osmolski³

“Follow Me Around” came first. The public first heard the song as a soundcheck fragment in Meeting People Is Easy, and the band first played it in concert in Toronto in October 2000. Osmolski built his version on Yorke's solo acoustic take at the end of the KROQ breakfast session in Hollywood last September, editing the vocal and guitar to a fixed tempo and making the rest at home in Cubase. He posted it on the At Ease message board as “devilhood”, and it spread from there. When Q put “Follow Me Around” on its “What's on our iPod” list in its February issue, the version on the list was Osmolski's.

“Big Ideas”, also known as “Nude”, went up on 11 May. It dates from the first OK Computer sessions in 1996. Osmolski started from Yorke playing it alone on acoustic guitar at Akasaka Blitz in Tokyo on 23 January 1998, the night the song was first played live, and this time left the vocal and guitar at their own pace. An organ plugin plays Jonny Greenwood's part and an amp modeller Ed O'Brien's rhythm guitar and the loud ending, in an arrangement taken mostly from the band's San Francisco show of 2 April 1998, with more harmonies of his own.

What I'm doing is providing people with a slightly more enhanced bootleg, built around that live feel.

Pawel Osmolski¹

Osmolski tells NME that Yorke once said he would like to hear “Big Ideas” played by someone else, and thinks he might be interested in the result. Yorke told Rolling Stone this month that he had once thought of asking Elvis Costello and the Attractions to record it, but never found the courage.