Lurgee

the sessions that produced “creep” by accident

EMI had two songs in mind for a first single: “Inside My Head” and this one. Sean Slade and Paul Kolderie started at Chipping Norton by trying to get one of them right, with a band Kolderie remembered as desperately inexperienced, and got neither. What they got instead, from the band playing between attempts, was “Creep”.

The band did not like the version of this song they made with Slade and Kolderie, so for the album they went back to an earlier recording, made with Chris Hufford at Courtyard Studios, which he co-owned. The Pablo Honey booklet says as much in its credits: everything recorded at Chipping Norton, except two tracks marked as Courtyard recordings produced by Hufford: this one and “I Can't”. The same take had already been the B-side of the first “Creep” single on 21 September 1992, second of four tracks. It ends in a long, unhurried solo that Zaleski, in Salon, called meandering.

the lurgy

The title is British slang: the lurgy is whatever vague illness you have caught and are now shaking off. The 2003 version of this site spelt out the pronunciation for its readers. The song is about getting over a person, told as getting over a bug: the singer keeps telling himself he is better and stronger now the other one has gone.

In February 2007 Q put it, with “Blow Out”, among twenty essential lesser-known Radiohead songs in its “500 Greatest Lost Tracks”.

the survivor

The archive has it on 109 nights, starting at the Duchess of York in Leeds on 27 October 1992, with thirty-six in 1993. Then 1997 and 1998, the OK Computer years, brought it back: twenty-three nights and then twenty-one. At the fan-club show at the London Astoria in September 1997, NME's Mat Smith heard it in what he called a cyber-country arrangement. At the Rosemont Theatre outside Chicago on 10 April 1998, with “Creep” left out, the Chicago Tribune counted it as the only first-album song of the night, and Yorke introduced it with a confession.

we didn't know what we were doing… it's called learning

thom yorke · rosemont theatre, 10 april 1998

It was the only Pablo Honey song at Radio City Music Hall eight days later, and then it went quiet for 789 days, until the Teatro Tivoli in Barcelona on 15 June 2000.

four nights on the hail to the thief tour

It turned up four times in 2003, all on the second North American leg. At Shoreline Amphitheatre on 23 September the treefingers.com desk wrote down Yorke's introduction.

There are many reasons for this. Not gonna tell you any of 'em.

thom yorke · shoreline amphitheatre, 23 september 2003

He had just said they didn't often play songs from the first record. It came back at the Hollywood Bowl, and in Houston on 1 October the Houston Chronicle's reviewer heard in it an early sketch of the lullabies that came later, “No Surprises” among them. The last performance on record is Madison Square Garden on 9 October 2003. It closed four shows in all.