Song · Kid A / Amnesiac era (2000–01)
Morning Bell/Amnesiac
Yorke said they found this take again by accident, having forgotten it, and kept it because it sounded like a recurring dream.
Amnesiacalbum- 2001released
- 3:14length
1999
the one they forgot
The two accounts of where this recording came from do not quite line up. David Fricke, reporting for Rolling Stone in the summer of 2001, put the Kid A take of “Morning Bell” on the second day of the Copenhagen sessions in 1999, recorded alongside “Knives Out” and “Dollars and Cents”, and wrote that the song was good enough for the band to cut it again for Amnesiac.
Yorke told it differently. Asked on the band's Spin With a Grin question page why the song turned up on a second album, he gave four short reasons in lower case: it came from a very different place, they had forgotten it and found it again by accident, it felt right, and this one.
because it sounds like a recurring dream.
thom yorke · spin with a grin, 2001
Ed O'Brien, on Channel 4's teletext music page Planet Sound on 19 May 2001, said the band often record a song several ways and drop the versions they don't use. This one, he said, was “strong enough to bear hearing again”.
2001
what changed
The words and the tune are the ones on Kid A. Everything under them moved. The note on the 2003 site's lyrics page, taken from a Jam! review, heard the piano-driven shuffle of the original swapped for a slow, dirge-like strum. Fricke, in his May 2001 preview of the album, set the electronic haze of the first recording against a new one that tinkles where the old one hummed. Jon Pareles, reviewing Amnesiac for Rolling Stone, thought it the more desperate of the two, the arrangement slowly sliding out of key around the voice.
It is also much shorter: 3:14 against the 4:35 of the Kid A track, and it sits seventh on Amnesiac where the original sat ninth on Kid A.
Alexis Petridis, who had not liked Kid A, singled out the song's question about a parked car in his Guardian review of 1 June 2001, hearing a man having a breakdown “by the pay-and-display machine”.
2021
a third reading
Kid A Mnesia, released on 5 November 2021, put both albums back out together with a third disc of session material, Kid Amnesiae. On it is a two-minute “The Morning Bell (In the Dark Version)”; Chris DeVille at Stereogum noted that “Morning Bell”, already out in several forms, had been changed yet again.
on stage
filed under kid a
The live archive holds no night under this title. Every performance of the song it knows, from Arles in June 2000 on, is filed under the Kid A recording.
the video
The Amnesiac recording.· Newfound Recordingswatch on youtube →
Tabs (1)
sources9
- Thom Yorke, answer to Tique De Koninck, Spin With a Grin (radiohead.com's question page), 2001, for why the song is on Amnesiac.
- Wikipedia, “Amnesiac (album)”, for Ed O'Brien's comment on Planet Sound (Channel 4 teletext, 19 May 2001).
- David Fricke, “Radiohead warm up with Amnesiac”, Rolling Stone, 24 May 2001, for the two arrangements compared.
- David Fricke, “Radiohead: making music that matters”, Rolling Stone, 2 August 2001, for the Copenhagen session.
- Jon Pareles, review of Amnesiac, Rolling Stone, 29 May 2001, for the more desperate version.
- Alexis Petridis, “Relax: it's nothing like Kid A”, The Guardian, 1 June 2001, for the parked car.
- Chris DeVille, “Stream Radiohead's Kid Amnesiae”, Stereogum, 5 November 2021, for the In the Dark Version.
- Wikipedia, “Kid A Mnesia” and “Kid A”, for the track listings and running times.
- The 2003 site's lyrics file for the song, quoting Jam!, for the slow strum.