Electioneering

an apple shed near didcot

It was one of four songs nearly finished at Canned Applause, the band's rehearsal space near Didcot, before the sessions moved to Bath; the others were “No Surprises”, “Subterranean Homesick Alien” and “The Tourist”. Ed O'Brien described the place as an apple-storage shed on a farm with nothing around it. Nigel Godrich called it a cork box without a toilet, with cows in the next field and a power station on the horizon.

Of everything on the album this is the one that sounds most like a rock band in a room, with a cowbell, Phil Selway charging, and Jonny Greenwood scratching away. Caroline Sullivan, reviewing the record for the Guardian in June 1997, counted it among the heaviest things they had done, and the authors Mac Randall and Tim Footman both reached back to Pablo Honey for a comparison.

the tag that came off

On the road in 1996 it ended differently. Thom Yorke and O'Brien would sing a bouncy refrain over and over at the close, a feel-good tag that the 2003 version of this site remembered fans being surprised, and a little let down, to find missing from the record.

kissing babies

Yorke told Select he had the poll tax riots in mind, the moment the horses broke through the barriers and the windows started going, along with too many evenings watching MPs on television. He told The Times the song was an incitement to riot. He was also reading Noam Chomsky for the first time, Manufacturing Consent in particular, and he argued that the world banking system and the media made it almost irrelevant who was in power.

Political systems worldwide are at the mercy of business and bullshit economies.

thom yorke · quoted on the 2003 site

The band were shaking hands for a living in 1997, and O'Brien made the link in the magazine Humo. After a while, he said, you feel like a politician who has to kiss babies and shake hands all day long. Looking back for Rolling Stone in 2017, Yorke admitted that he was not much good at the glad-handing himself, and that Colin Greenwood could talk anybody into the ground. He remembered the optimism around Tony Blair's arrival, and how it was obvious within months that self-interest had not gone anywhere.

the tonight show

The archive first has it at the Troubadour in West Hollywood on 14 March 1996, more than a year before the album. When the band went on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno at NBC on 25 July 1997, the night before their show at the Wiltern in Los Angeles, they played one song, and it was this one.

In 1998 it made the set three times, and since Dallas on 29 March 1998 the band have left it alone. Morgan Heritage took it on in 2006 for Radiodread, the Easy Star All-Stars' reggae version of OK Computer.

horse-trading

In April 2000, as the band finished the record after OK Computer, O'Brien wrote in his studio diary that sequencing OK Computer had been a nightmare of set agendas and horse-trading, and that this song was part of the trade.

If you want “Let Down” on the record then it only makes sense if “Electioneering” is on there, too.

ed o'brien · radiohead.com, 16 april 2000