Electioneering

an apple shed near didcot

It was one of four songs nearly finished at Canned Applause before the sessions moved to Bath, along with “No Surprises”, “Subterranean Homesick Alien” and “The Tourist”. Canned Applause was the band's rehearsal space near Didcot. Ed O'Brien described it 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: a cowbell, Selway charging, Jonny Greenwood scratching away and then a distorted solo. Caroline Sullivan's Guardian review in June 1997 heard it as one of the heaviest things they had done, and 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. Yorke and O'Brien would sing a bouncy refrain over and over at the close, a feel-good tag that the 2003 site remembered fans being surprised and a little let down to find missing from the record. On OK Computer the song ends instead on Yorke's repeated line about going forwards while you go backwards, and a crush of guitars.

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 was also reading Noam Chomsky for the first time, Manufacturing Consent in particular. The band were shaking hands for a living that year, and O'Brien made the link in Humo.

A politician who has to kiss babies and shake hands all day long.

ed o'brien · humo, 22 july 1997

Yorke told Rolling Stone he was not much good at the glad-handing and that Colin Greenwood could talk anybody into the ground. He also likened the lyric to a preacher ranting into a bank of microphones. His argument in 1997 was 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.

thom yorke · quoted on the 2003 site

Looking back in 2017, he remembered the optimism around Tony Blair's arrival, and how it was obvious within months that self-interest had not gone anywhere.

fifty-seven nights

It was played long before the album existed: the archive's first night is the Troubadour in Los Angeles on 14 March 1996. It was in the set twenty-three times that year and thirty-one in 1997. Then three in 1998, the last at the Music Hall at Fair Park in Dallas on 29 March. It opened two shows and closed four, and fifty-seven nights is the whole of its life on stage.

Morgan Heritage took it on for Radiodread, the Easy Star All-Stars' 2006 reggae version of OK Computer.