Song · Kid A / Amnesiac era (2000–01)
Morning Bell/Amnesiac
Radiohead put “Morning Bell” on Kid A, then put it out again eight months later, recorded another way, on Amnesiac.
Amnesiacalbum- 2001released
- 3:14length
1999
the one they forgot
The accounts of why there is a second recording do not quite line up. David Fricke, reporting for Rolling Stone in the summer of 2001, dated the Kid A take to the second day of the Copenhagen sessions in 1999, alongside “Knives Out” and “Dollars and Cents”, and wrote that the song was so good the band cut it again for Amnesiac.
Thom Yorke told it differently. Asked on Spin With a Grin, the band's 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 the last 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 thought, was strong enough to bear hearing again.
2001
what changed
Amnesiac came out on 4 June 2001, eight months after Kid A. The words and the tune are the ones on Kid A. Everything under them moved. The 2003 site kept a review from Jam!, the Canadian entertainment site, which heard the piano-driven shuffle of the original turned into a slow, dirge-like strum. Fricke, previewing the album in May 2001, heard the new one tinkle where the old one hummed. Jon Pareles, reviewing Amnesiac for Rolling Stone, thought it the more desperate of the two, the arrangement sliding slowly out of key around the voice.
It is much shorter too, 3:14 against the 4:35 of the Kid A track, and it sits seventh on Amnesiac where the original sat ninth. Alexis Petridis, who had not liked Kid A, picked out its question about a parked car in his Guardian review, and heard a man coming apart at a car-park ticket machine.
Kid A Mnesia in 2021 added a third reading, the two-minute “The Morning Bell (In the Dark Version)”, on its disc of session material, Kid Amnesiae.
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. At the Royal Festival Hall in London on 1 July 2000, three months before Kid A came out, Yorke played it at the piano and introduced it in one line.
This is a song about amnesia.
thom yorke, on stage · nme, 1 july 2000
the video
The Amnesiac recording.· Newfound Recordingswatch on youtube →
the record(2)
Tabs (1)
sources10
- 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 Kid A take in Copenhagen and the second cut.
- 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.
- NME, “HEROIC RETURN FOR RADIOHEAD”, 1 July 2000, for the introduction at the Royal Festival Hall.
- The 2003 site's lyrics file for the song, quoting Jam!, for the slow strum.