Morning Mr Magpie

morning, me lord

Radiohead broke off from finishing Hail to the Thief on the evening of 18 December 2002 to webcast four songs from their studio in Oxford, with Colin Greenwood and Thom Yorke hosting and records played in between. Two of the songs had never been heard, and one was this, quick and led by acoustic guitar. Colin introduced it as “Morning, Me Lord”, and NME thought it sounded like the Beatles.

It was not on Hail to the Thief, but it got about. Christopher O'Riley, the American pianist who had been working Radiohead songs out by ear for his radio show, put his own arrangement of “Good Morning Mr Magpie” up as a free download in April 2003, and NPR's Performance Today aired him playing it at a concert in Portland, Oregon, in October 2004. That December the band's DVD The Most Gigantic Lying Mouth of All Time, gathered from the internet television channel they ran in 2003 and sold through their website, included Yorke alone with an acoustic guitar playing it. Josh Modell, who did not care for much of the disc, singled it out in The A.V. Club under the name “Morning M'Lord”.

wound tight

For The King of Limbs they took the old song and wound it tight. Andy Gill in the Independent heard a damped guitar riff and hi-hat under sheets of sound that grow and grow, until everything drops away into a quiet clearing near the end.

Most of the attention went to the drums. Will Hermes in Rolling Stone used the song to argue that Phil Selway is one of rock's great drummers, machines or no machines, and Jon Dolan, in the same magazine, heard Selway twisting the beats like the Meters gone post-punk. Ten years on, Chris DeVille at Stereogum heard Talking Heads with the blood let out of them, knowing perfectly well that a Talking Heads song, “Radio Head”, gave the band its name.

Only “Bloom” was remixed more. Nathan Fake's version came out on the second TKOL RMX 12-inch on 15 July 2011 and Pearson Sound's “Scavenger” on the third, and Modeselektor, on the sixth, renamed theirs “Good Evening Mrs Magpie”.

harder and faster

The full band first played it live third in the surprise Glastonbury set on 24 June 2011, and it was in the encore at Roseland in New York on 28 September. At the last rehearsal before the 2012 tour opened in Miami, David Fricke heard it played harder and faster than the record, and 2012 is where most of its 68 nights are. At the Prudential Center in Newark that May it went out with a guitar figure in place of its electronics. After Melbourne on 16 November 2012 it was gone until Amsterdam on 20 May 2016, and it was last heard in Berkeley on 17 April 2017.

give it back

The lyric is an accusation. Somebody has taken everything, the magic and the melody included, and the singer wants it returned. Alexis Petridis in the Guardian took it for a song about the banking crisis, and heard the nervy guitars as part of the case.