Radiohead's OKNOTOK is out, with tens from Pitchfork and Drowned In Sound

OK Computer OKNOTOK 1997 2017 is out on XL today, the day Radiohead headline the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury. Announced in May, it sets the remastered album beside eight B-sides and the first studio releases of “I Promise”, “Man of War” and “Lift”, songs that have gone round among fans for years as live recordings and demos.

Jayson Greene gives the reissue 10 and Best New Reissue at Pitchfork, and Andrzej Lukowski gives it 10 out of 10 at Drowned In Sound. Greene points out that “Lift” is about a man stuck in a lift, nearer to “No Surprises” than its sunny chorus lets on. Lukowski thinks any of the three would have broken the album's cold, experimental mood, and likens “Man of War” to the Radiohead of The Bends writing a Bond theme. SPIN rates “Man of War” the best of them. It puts the studio “Lift” below the live versions fans have traded, its drums pattering where they used to explode.

Alexis Petridis, reviewing it for the Guardian, argues that OK Computer owes less to a vision of the digital age than to the slog of promoting The Bends in America, which makes it perhaps the best-disguised complaint any band has made about its own success.

Why “Lift” was left off, after 30 shows in 1996, is told more than one way. In Petridis's account it was first played on the American tour supporting Alanis Morissette, where it was the one new song that went down well. The band dropped it, he says, because they knew it was an obvious hit. Ed O'Brien told BBC 6 Music in May that everyone at the time said it would be a hit. And everyone was saying this, and we kind of subconsciously killed it.⁵ The band never made a good version, he says, because when we got to the studio and did it, it felt like having a gun to your head. It was too much pressure.⁵