"OK Computer": Classic Or Dud?

hearing all the demos is fascinating, especially the early version of The National Anthem, and Motion Picture Soundtrack and Nude are fantastic here

I would love to listen to their outtakes and experiments because their recorded output is obviously meticulously controlled and their live performances don't include much room for improv (cue someone telling me about jonnys guitar solos or thom moaninv slightly differently but come on when a Radiohead song starts, live, you pretty much know exactly how it will proceed)

Wait has this shit leaked yet?

Fuuuuck I gotta get on it

I am very curious about

Lull (ed guitar infinite reverb)

:)

"Polyethylene" is in their top 5 imo

I recall a slower standalone version of the 3rd section in "Paranoid Android" (the "rain down" part) appearing in Meeting People Is Easy and I always wanted to hear that demo on its own, but it's been tough to locate on file sharing.

My opinion on this record is that . . . . . . . . . it’s good.

You can find the whole thing on Soulseek. There's many useless and kind of creepy snippets (the isolated radio loops for Climbing Up the Walls in particular are terrifying - or at least they are to me hearing them alone in my house at night) but it's cool they're there... if we only keep the full songs, we have:

Let Down (Thom 4 Track)
Attention (Thom 4 Track)
Motion Picture Soundtrack (solo piano)
No Surprises (first idea from soundcheck somewhere)
Are You Someone?
Climbing Up The Walls (Thom 4 Track)
Airbag (early acoustic version)
Nude (early band version)
The National Anthem (Thom 4 Track)
Man Of War (live in Montpellier)

Attention and Are You Someone? are new songs. The former sounds REM inspired, the later is a weird sort of song coming from them at this era... very 90's angst like something off of Pablo Honey or The Bends... sounds like the distant cousin of Talk Show Host. It wouldn't fit at all in OKC.
Let Down and Airbag demos sounds like they come from an alternate universe where OKC was released by an indie jangle rock band. Supposedly the way the guitars sound in the album version of Let Down is actually a layer error that sent one of the guitars playing earlier and they loved the sound so they kept it that way. I don't know if it's true or not but it's cool to hear this version with that guitar missing.
MPS is perhaps the best vocal performance from Thom in here and it's better than the KID A one. I kind of want to hear an edit of this vocals with the music from Kid A.
Climbing Up The Walls demo is some sort of trip hop/rock version that wouldn't sound out of place in a Gorillaz album (or maybe a NIN one).
Nude is similar sound-wise to the version from Meeting People is Easy but it has radically different lyrics to that one and the one that ended up in IR. It's kind of weak in this form and good they saved it for later.
National Anthem is really different to the KID A version... slower bass but faster drums. The anxiety from Kid A is there but this is another one that it was so good they saved, in this form it sounds like a bad outtake off of U2's Zooropa or POP.

I always liked this better than the Kid A version. (And it has a 3rd verse.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmjyUce7kSU

I'll no doubt get around to hearing this stuff at some point, but I'm not exactly in any kind of rush to hear this stuff - I have a huge feeling it's all stuff that's worth hearing once and that's it.

Listening to the cassette is reminiscent of hearing the mixture of music and sound design in Meeting People is Easy.

I'm thinking the box set should hold its value pretty well so once I've had my fill of the tape I'm just gonna flip it, if I lose 20 bucks on it I'll just chalk that up as the cost of the tape

The tape has so many interesting moments that gives you a peek into their creative process. There's per example Nigel sampling a guitar from Paranoid Android which ended up being used as the background ambience in Fitter Happier. You can also hear how Paranoid Android was recorded in different rooms - loud parts where done in bigger rooms apparently and then spliced into the quier parts.

Oh there's also geeky stuff hidden in the tape! The last track "ok computer program" is an actual ZX spectrum program:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JDM5YBS6KMc

^^ that's exactly what i'm hoping it will be, awesome

this is really sweet, i love when bands put out the raw sludge of their creative process. listening to that first True Love Waits loop took me aback, I knew I had heard one of those bleeps before- it ended up being incorporated into Pull/Pulk.

the Let Down demo is so amazing

Big fan of the presentation of demo material in this fashion.

Yeah and the Demo/doodle of No Surprises. I too think this is a great idea. And yeah the sound design; bits floating in and out is very Meeting People Is Easy.

the Airbag demo is great, too - i just wish it had double tracked guitars & vox like the Let Down demo

also lol a bunch of Radiohead superfans came into the store the other day and they were talking about how much better the Motion Picture Soundtrack version is than the Kid A one. they repeated the party line - "it's just... it's his best vocal." I don't get that... I love the song, but the mellow/passive delivery on Kid A and all the awesome Disney-esque accouterments are so much better... first of all, the piano on this demo is low in the mix and distorted, it sounds shitty, and his vocal is so saccharine, so glad they saved that one...

I don't really like I Promise or Lift. But Man of War is really excellent.

'Man of War' is the best of the three for me, but I enjoy the other two, even if I don't see what zillions of hardcore Radiohead fans have seen in 'Lift' all these years.

yeah I didn't either, but when the studio version came out it really snuck up on me. not a red letter song, but there's something about it that's stuck with me. i like "Man O War" but don't dig the Bond theme vibe.

look i know we have two active radiohead threads right now but we should talk about the 18 hours of ok computer-era tapes that just leaked maybe?

I still think OKC is one of the greatest albums of all time, and by far Radiohead's best album, but I don't have the slightest interest in listening to this.

there is a lot to dig through here but so far it's very very cool to finally hear the version of True Love Waits they had at the time - it's not that great and it's easy to hear why they were unhappy with it but fascinating nontheless

oh damn, where??

other highlights: a lot of great early versions of Motion Picture Soundtrack, a fair few takes of Lift including one great one that's now the definitive version for me

I'm generally good at this stuff, but I can't find a link. And I'm not looking at fucking *chan.

i kind of lucked out, did a slsk search on the filename (ok minidisc) and found someone sharing the zip file. by this time user is probably swarmed with people in queue though. i'm not sharing it myself because i don't want to spend the next month sending out a 1 gb zip file to everybody on slsk, i've done my service in other ways.

aha, thanks for title.

Smart part of my brain keeps thinking "OK Malware."

is there any funny banter

1 sl5k hit "

file not shared" :(

I would also like to d/l this somehow!

also desperately want the equivalent of this leak but for the Kid A/Amnesiac era

I'd love that. So much material was generated and worked on during those sessions.

Think I might have found it, do a Ggl search for the title in inverted commas and there's a thread from a site a few hits down, you'll have to register to access the link.

google doc breaking down the contents:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kA8u6UhjbutZ-b7TXzmX4qkOTg6nGC1vPg50WwCcZyo/preview

Above link is legit.

1:04:31 start of a song i've heard but i forgot the name (the one that goes pa pa pa pa pa pa)

'Pulled Apart By Horses'?

About Kid A/Amnesiac stuff: https://www.nme.com/news/music/thom-yorke-says-radiohead-plan-something-really-cool-material-kid-amnesiac-2485762

i'm checking out on Radiohead internet stuff til i listen to this whole thing ... over.. some .. time! i'd have lost my mind completely over this in the 90s.

Seems that the version of Lift which is on disc/track 15 around 10 minutes in, is amazing people are saying.

Also there’s a cover of Ride to Atlantis, by Marvin Hamlisch, from the soundtrack to The Spy Who Loved Me. Hands up who saw that coming?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ji596s9vyzw&feature=youtu.be

i only got through the first disc today, am taking my time with it (i.e. occasionally working). i love these just random piles of stuff, this sense of discovery, even when that discovery is "oh look it's yet another fucking live version of 'i promise', i wonder if they'll do 'electioneering' next"

i live for this shit. whatever radiohead winds up doing for kid a/amnesiac, i hope somebody steals thom's minidiscs for that one too

This mid-80s-Bowie take on "True Love Waits" is nuts. Like, imagine the ballroom scene of 'Labyrinth' but "just don't leave, don't leave". Wow.

Tom beatboxing along to the telly playing a clip from Halloween is great.

*Thom ffs, bloody phone

would i be kosher for me to post a link to this stuff on archive.org? cuz it's there.