Radiohead put Thom Yorke in a lift for the “Lift” video

Radiohead released Oscar Hudson's video for “Lift” on 12 September, and it takes the title at its word. Thom Yorke rides a lift from the 17th floor down to the first, his shopping in plastic bags, and never mimes a line of the song. Passengers get on and off at every floor. A crowd of identical bald businessmen swallows him up, and a man mopping the floor pushes him into a corner.

Hudson also made the film for “The Numbers”, one of the vignettes the band posted for A Moon Shaped Pool in May last year. The other two songs from the vaults on OK Computer OKNOTOK 1997 2017, “I Promise” and “Man of War”, had their videos in June, before the reissue came out on 23 June.

The band first played “Lift” at the Troubadour in West Hollywood in March 1996 and kept it in the set all that year, including the dates supporting Alanis Morissette. They brought it back for four shows in Portugal and Spain in 2002. It never made OK Computer. I think we kind of subconsciously killed it¹⁴, Ed O'Brien said in a 2016 interview that BBC Radio 6 Music first aired on 3 May this year. Had it been on the album, he said, it would have taken the band somewhere else and sold a lot more records, and a hit the size of Morissette's Jagged Little Pill would have killed them.