I Promise

the new songs

It was first played at the Fillmore in San Francisco on 27 March 1996, and it travelled with the band through that spring as one of the new songs in the set, beside “Electioneering” and “Lift”. Neil Strauss heard all three at Roseland in New York for the New York Times, and at an unannounced show at the Zodiac in Oxford that July Mark Beaumont of NME picked it out with “Lift” and “Subterranean Homesick Alien” and rated all three highly. It was still in the set when they opened for Alanis Morissette in August, and the bootlegs went round.

Then it went into the OK Computer sessions and came out again, because the band decided it was not strong enough. Ed O'Brien suggested in 1998 that they re-record it for the next album. By the time In Rainbows was out he was saying they had given up on it.

orbison, or joy division

It is strummed acoustic guitar, drums like a marching band and Mellotron underneath. O'Brien heard Roy Orbison in it, and Thom Yorke heard Joy Division. NME's guide to the unreleased songs on OKNOTOK 1997 2017, the OK Computer reissue, filed it as Radiohead at their most direct, just before they went deep into electronic sounds. The words are a run of promises, one after another, with the loneliness of the album they were cut for and none of its machinery.

found again

Steve Lamacq gave it its first play on BBC Radio 6 Music on 2 June 2017, and said the band had believed the recording lost and were happy to have found it. That day it went up as a download for anyone who had pre-ordered OKNOTOK 1997 2017, with a video by Michal Marczak of a night bus through Warsaw, one of its passengers an animatronic head. NPR took the film to be about what the OK Computer tour did to its singer. Pitchfork made it Best New Music, and Marc Hogan reckoned that, out in 1997, it would have been heard wherever sensitive young men with guitars gathered.

oslo, 21 years later

Five days later, at the second of two nights at the Spektrum in Oslo on 7 June, it opened the first encore, its first performance since 1996. It was played three times that summer, up to Manchester on 4 July 2017.

What a bunch of nutters we were, and probably still are… One of the crazy things we did was not release this song, because we didn't think it was good enough.

thom yorke, on stage, june 2017

on the radio

Alexis Petridis, reviewing the reissue for the Guardian that month, noted that BBC Radio 2 and 6 Music had both put it on their playlists, as if it were a new song.