Lift

the troubadour

They played it for the first time at the Troubadour in West Hollywood on 14 March 1996, and on twenty-seven nights that year while supporting Alanis Morissette on the Jagged Little Pill tour. It worked immediately.

Suddenly you'd see them get up and start grooving. It had this kind of infectiousness.

ed o'brien · fact, 3 may 2017

Journalists at those shows marked it down as the obvious future single. Bootlegs of it circulated for twenty years and it became the best known of the songs nobody could buy.

chipping norton, then nothing

They recorded it with Nigel Godrich during the first OK Computer sessions at Chipping Norton. Godrich has said it was lined up to be the album's first single. Then they left it off the record, and spent the next two decades explaining why.

Philip Selway said the band came to find it “fey”, and not “what we wanted to say about ourselves as a band at the time”. In 1999 Ed O'Brien called it “bogshite” and said they were “very happy to leave [it] off the album… There wasn't any stage where it was a key track for any of us.” Yorke's account is more technical: they had settled into playing it a certain way that did not work, and could not then rearrange it. O'Brien also said the plain truth was that they had not worked hard at it, and their habit was to drop anything that did not come together fast.

In 2017 O'Brien gave a different reason.

If that song had been on that album, it would have taken us to a different place, and we'd have probably sold a lot more records, if we'd done it right, and everyone was saying this. I think we kind of subconsciously killed it, because if OK Computer had been like a Jagged Little Pill, like Alanis Morissette, it would have killed us.

ed o'brien · bbc radio 6 music, 3 may 2017

the second attempt

They brought it back in a new arrangement in 2002 and did not like that either. The last performance in this archive is Salamanca, 6 August 2002. O'Brien's verdict at the time: “The spirit of the song was there in '96… And we're not in that place at the moment.”

released, twenty-one years late

The 1996 recording came out on OKNOTOK 1997 2017, with a video following on 12 September. Reviews were warm, and several critics said what fans with bootlegs had been saying for years: the live versions had more in them.

You have it there and then you just try to pull it apart and then when you put it back together it doesn't look like a television set any more… But it was there all along. And so it's been lovely, really lovely, coming back to that version of it. Just thinking, ‘Oh OK, we weren't wrong about that one.’ That had something.

philip selway · radio x, june 2017

Rolling Stone called it “one of the last vestiges of [Radiohead's] anthemic, Britpop hooks before the band embarked on a darker path”. More versions from the same period surfaced in the 2019 minidisc leak, and were generally better received than the official one.