Lift

a summer anthem

They played it for the first time at the Troubadour in West Hollywood on 14 March 1996, and it was in the set on twenty-eight nights that year. At the Metro in Chicago that April the Chicago Tribune picked it as the most dramatic moment of the night, and a quiet one. Colin Greenwood and Phil Selway set a light groove, Jonny Greenwood played synthesised strings, and Ed O'Brien sang a counter-melody under Thom Yorke in the chorus. By July Mark Beaumont was calling it a summer anthem in NME, and the paper put the phrase in its headline.

On Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill tour that summer, where Radiohead were the support, it worked even on crowds who had come for someone else.

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

ed o'brien · fact, 3 may 2017

The bootlegs went round for 21 years, and it became the best known of the lost OK Computer songs.

chipping norton, then nothing

They recorded it with Nigel Godrich during the first OK Computer sessions at Chipping Norton, and 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.

Selway said the band came to find it fey, not what they wanted to say about themselves at the time. In 1999 O'Brien called it “bogshite” and said it had never been a key track for any of them. Yorke's account is more technical. They had settled into playing it one way that did not work, he said, and then could not rearrange it. O'Brien admitted too that they had not worked hard at it, since their habit was to drop anything that did not come together fast.

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

lisbon

It came back on the first of three nights at the Coliseu dos Recreios in Lisbon on 22 July 2002, the band's first concerts since the autumn before, where it opened the first encore on a night that began with eight songs they had never played at a concert. The band had not played it since Hershey in August 1996, and it came back slowed down and reworked, without O'Brien's counter-melody. It was played again at Porto, San Sebastián and Salamanca on 6 August 2002, and the band did not take to this version either. “The spirit of the song was there in '96… And we're not in that place at the moment,” O'Brien said.

released, 21 years late

The 1996 recording finally came out on OKNOTOK 1997 2017, with a video following on 12 September. Andy Cush at Spin found it strangely neutered, its drums pattering where on the live versions they explode, and an old bootleg stayed the real “Lift” for him. More takes from the same period surfaced in the minidisc leak of 2019.

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.’

philip selway · radio x, june 2017