Song · Kid A / Amnesiac era (2000–01)
Motion Picture Soundtrack
Older than “Creep”, it waited most of a decade for the band to find it a setting, and got a pump organ and Disney harps.
Kid Aalbum- 2000released
- 7:01length
early 1990s
older than creep
The band told Record Collector in 2000 that it predated “Creep”, which puts it back in the On a Friday years, before there was a Radiohead to record it. It was being sung in public by the spring of 1996: the archive's first performance is a radio session at WHFS in Rockville on 10 April that year.
On the OK Computer tour it became an occasional encore, often just Yorke's voice and an acoustic guitar. Eight nights in 1997 and one in 1998, and then nothing for 942 days after Festival Hall in Melbourne on 2 February 1998.
1996–97
the piano version
They tried it in the studio during the OK Computer sessions, with Yorke at a piano, and left it. That take stayed in the vaults until 2017, when it came out on the cassette in the special edition of OKNOTOK. Jamie Atkins, reviewing the box for Record Collector, stopped on it.
To these ears it's one of the performances of his career.
jamie atkins · record collector, 22 june 2017
He heard it start out wounded and finish defiant.
1999–2000
pump organ and harps
It came back during the Kid A sessions. The 2003 version of this site kept two of Yorke's own studio notes from October 1999: good singing and amazing sounds from Jonny, Phil and Ed, halfway there; then a rhythm track, a plan to try keyboards and “endless guitar solos”, and a feeling he would have to sing it again.
None of the guitar solos survived. Yorke recorded the song on a pedal organ, with Tom Waits in mind, and the band added sampled harps and double bass, aiming for the soundtracks of 1950s Disney films. The contrast was the point. Simon Reynolds in Spin heard the album end on a whimper, Yorke numbing a heartbreak with pills, wine and sad films under harps and heavenly voices that came close to kitsch. Brent DiCrescenzo in Pitchfork heard the White Album in it, Lennon's “Julia” crossed with that record's maudlin last track, and Andrew Smith in The Observer wrote of its “near devotional hush”.
It is 7:01 long because the song is not the end of the track. After it comes a long silence and then a short untitled ambient coda, which Rob Mitchum in Pitchfork reckoned justified the hidden-track gimmick.
2000–01
the last song
They played it again at Tredegar House in Newport on 1 September 2000, and sixteen times that year, then five times in 2001. Across its 31 nights in the archive it closed the show eleven times and never opened one. The last is South Park in Oxford, the hometown show, on 7 July 2001.
after
motion picture house
The Guardian ranked it 19th of the band's 40 best songs in 2020; Marc Hogan at Vulture put it at 29. It went onto Kid A Mnesia in 2021, and in 2026 the band opened an installation of the Kid A and Amnesiac artwork and remixed music at the Coachella festival on 10 April, under the name Motion Picture House.
on stage
Live at The Gorge 2001.· WiseRileywatch on youtube →
explained
It predates “Creep” and waited years before it closed Kid A.· Stempwatch on youtube →
Live history
| Times played | 31 shows |
|---|---|
| Live debut | Wednesday 10 April 1996 · Rockville |
| Last played | Saturday 7 July 2001 · Oxford |
| Closed the night | 11 times |
| Longest absence | 2 years · back on Friday 1 September 2000 · Newport |
First played live in 1996, 4 years before it was released.
Nights played include broadcasts; opened and closed count gigs only. A cancelled night has no setlist. All setlist stats →
Tabs (1)
Heard in (2)
- Westworld
- Nine Perfect StrangersUnder the shared hallucination in the woods.
sources12
- Jake Kennedy, “Kid A Rock”, Record Collector, November 2000, for the song predating “Creep”.
- Jazz Monroe, “Radiohead's 40 greatest songs, ranked!”, The Guardian, 23 January 2020, for On a Friday and the ranking.
- Wikipedia, “Kid A”, for the piano version, the pedal organ, Tom Waits, the harps, the double bass and Disney (citing Jonny and Colin Greenwood, Morning Becomes Eclectic, KCRW, 20 October 2000, and Mixing It, BBC Radio 3, 20 January 2001).
- Jamie Atkins, “OK Computer: OKNOTOK 1997–2017”, Record Collector, 22 June 2017.
- Wikipedia, “OK Computer OKNOTOK 1997 2017”, for the cassette.
- Thom Yorke's studio notes, October and 12 October 1999, and the site's own note on the OK Computer tour encores, both on the 2003 treefingers.com lyric page (
_legacy/lyrics/songs/motion_picture_soundtrack.txt). - Simon Reynolds, “Radio Chaos”, Spin, October 2000.
- Brent DiCrescenzo, “Kid A”, Pitchfork, 2 October 2000, for the White Album.
- Andrew Smith, “Sound and fury”, The Observer, 1 October 2000.
- Rob Mitchum, “Radiohead: Kid A (Special Collectors Edition)”, Pitchfork, 25 August 2009, for the coda.
- Marc Hogan, “I Might Be Wrong: every Radiohead song, ranked”, Vulture, 28 March 2019.
- “Radiohead's ‘Motion Picture House: Kid A Mnesia’ to premiere at Coachella, then play in installations in four cities”, Variety, 8 April 2026, for the installation.