Morning Mr Magpie

the dvd version

It was around long before the album. In May 2003, with Hail to the Thief coming out, Radiohead started their own internet television channel, showing videos, fan films and webcast footage from the studio. The films were gathered on the DVD The Most Gigantic Lying Mouth of All Time, released on 1 December 2004 and sold mostly through the band's website, and one of them is Yorke alone with an acoustic guitar playing this song.

Josh Modell reviewed the DVD for The A.V. Club that December. He was not keen on most of it, but singled out an excellent, otherwise unreleased song, which he called “Morning M'Lord”. That was as much as most people knew of it for the next six years. In January 2020 the band put the whole DVD up to stream free on their website.

rebuilt

For The King of Limbs they took the old acoustic song and wound it tight. Mark Pytlik at Pitchfork heard it made anxious, the warmth gone out of it; 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 called it “clattering, hyperactive, pencil-neck funk” and used it to argue that Phil Selway is one of rock's great drummers, machines or no machines. Jon Dolan, in the same magazine a month later, heard Selway twisting the beats like the Meters gone post-punk.

Like Talking Heads … with the blood drained out.

chris deville · stereogum, 18 february 2021

DeVille did not miss the joke: it was a Talking Heads song, “Radio Head”, that gave the band its name.

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.

four remixes

Only “Bloom” was remixed more. Nathan Fake's version came out on the second TKOL RMX 12-inch on 15 July 2011, Pearson Sound's “Scavenger” remix on the third, and Modeselektor retitled theirs “Good Evening Mrs Magpie” for the sixth on 12 September. Nathan Fake came back for a “Harshdub” mix on the eighth single, which came out too late for the album.

on stage

It was third in the surprise Glastonbury set on 24 June 2011 and was in the encore at Roseland in New York that September. At the last rehearsal before the 2012 tour opened in Miami, David Fricke heard it played harder and faster than the record. Fifty-five nights that year, 68 in all. After Melbourne on 16 November 2012 it was gone for 1,281 days, returning at the Heineken Music Hall in Amsterdam on 20 May 2016. The last one in the archive is in Berkeley on 17 April 2017.