Radiohead take another run at “Nude”, this time with strings

Radiohead are recording “Nude”, the song they have been trying to get right for almost ten years, Thom Yorke wrote on the band's website on Monday 20 February. Jonny Greenwood is hurriedly writing out parts for a string quartet booked for the next day. Right now we are working on 'Nude', it sounds beautiful, as far as I can tell.¹ NME reports “Nude” is set for the new album.

“Nude” goes back to the first OK Computer sessions, when it was called “Big Ideas” or “(Don't Get Any) Big Ideas”, and the version recorded then stayed off the album. Yorke first played it alone on acoustic guitar, in the encore at Akasaka Blitz in Tokyo on 23 January 1998, and the full band took it up in Dallas that March. An early take is in Meeting People Is Easy, the band's tour film, and bootlegs have gone round fans online, but no studio version has ever come out.

The band tried it again for Kid A and again for Hail to the Thief, and were happy neither time. In 2004 Yorke told Rolling Stone he had thought of asking Elvis Costello and the Attractions to record it instead.

The producer is Mark “Spike” Stent, whose credits run from Björk and Madonna to U2 and Depeche Mode. In an earlier posting Yorke wrote that the studio now looks like NASA and that Stent is making the band shake the dust off. He also passed on a remark of Jonny's that between them they had had six children since they were last Radiohead, which might explain the lack of focus.