Man of War

a bond theme on tour

It went into the set on The Bends tour as “Big Boots”, and Thom Yorke made no secret of what it was, a homage to the James Bond themes. The band were covering “Nobody Does It Better” on the same tour, so the idea was hardly hidden. It was played on sixteen nights between the Mercury Lounge in New York on 2 October and Montreal on 13 December, and for a while they thought of putting it out as a B-side to “Street Spirit (Fade Out)”.

chipping norton

Instead they recorded it with Nigel Godrich at Chipping Norton in February 1996, in the sessions that started OK Computer. Those began as a weekend's try-out, and Godrich remembered cutting two songs that weekend, this one and a new song of Yorke's called “Nude”. Then they left it alone. Phil Selway's explanation is that it sounded like the album they had just made, which was the thing they were trying to get away from.

We knew that it was a good song, but it never really found its place.

phil selway · radio x, june 2017

abbey road, and a bad week

In March 1998 they went into Abbey Road with Godrich to record a new, more electronic arrangement for the film of The Avengers. The session is in Meeting People Is Easy, and it is not a happy stretch of the film. They had a five-week break behind them and, Yorke said later, everything was coming to the surface; they were so messed up that they could not get the track done, and he called it a real low point.

That version stayed in the can too. The song was heard live once more, in Salamanca on 7 August 2002, more than six years after Montreal.

the bond film that said no

When Spectre came round, with a director and a leading man who were both fans, the band offered this song. It was turned down for not having been written for the film, which, for a song that had spent 20 years as a Bond pastiche, has a certain symmetry. They wrote a new one, “Spectre”, and that was not used either. In July 2015 William Hill suspended betting on the theme after somebody tried to stake £15,000 at ten to one on Radiohead getting it.

released as “man of war”

Of the two recordings, it was 1996 they went back to.

This is the version of the song we all felt best captured what was good about it.

phil selway · radio x, june 2017

It came out on 22 June 2017, a day before OKNOTOK 1997 2017, under the title “Man of War”, with a video by Colin Read. Brice Ezell, reviewing the reissue for PopMatters, thought it easily stood out of its three unreleased songs, and that OK Computer would have lost nothing by making room for it.