(Credits: Far Out / Radiohead / Tom Sheehan)
Music » Features » Lists
Reuben Cross
@reumilcro
Like it or not, Radiohead are one of the most significant bands of the modern era, and their name ought to be held in the same high regard as The Beatles and The Rolling Stones when it comes to the discussion of the greatest groups of all time.
“Oh, but they’re depressive misanthropes who like to think they’re cleverer than everyone else, and their singer whines too much,” I hear the naysayers faintly cry in the background. “How can you possibly say that their discography is flawless and on par with the excellence of other far more progressive bands such as Pink Floyd?”, another chorus chimes in.
Look, very few bands have a lengthy career without making a handful of howlers, and I can’t say that Radiohead are an exception to that rule either. However, there’s very little in their output that never deserved to see the light of day, and even a number of their B-sides and rarities live up to the same quality of the studio albums, which is remarkable considering how most bands struggle to scrape together enough A-grade material to warrant putting a full-length record out.
Given that, how do you choose 10 songs that deserve to be obliterated from the band’s discography when so much is held to a high standard? Knowing full well that any wrong choices in the selection will be enough to ruin friendships, relationships, and the chances of me ever being allowed into Oxfordshire again, I’ve painstakingly picked out which cuts of theirs I’d gladly lock away for eternity and never have to hear again, and if it means I’m permabanned from the fan club, so be it.
10 songs that Radiohead should have never released:
‘How Do You?’ (1993)
It would have been easy to just pick ten songs from Pablo Honey, but then again, we don’t need another article slamming their debut album. It gets enough hate as it is, and while it most definitely isn’t a patch on their later work, hurling more insults at all, bar two of its songs, would probably be considered bullying – which happens to be the subject matter of this pick from the first Radiohead record
‘How Do You?’ is possibly the least the band have ever sounded like themselves on a track. Admittedly, Radiohead spent a large amount of Pablo Honey figuring out the sound that they felt most comfortable in, but having Thom Yorke brattily sneering over the top of a less-than-exciting grunge riff feels miles away from where their strengths lay. While some of their later records experimented with a variety of different sounds and genres, they did it in a way that felt novel, whereas this felt like more of a tired pastiche of other genres that were popular at the time.
‘Thinking About You’ (1993)
The other pick from the first Radiohead album is a straightforward acoustic ballad, which, in contrast to ‘How Do You?’ feels tame and lacks any of the bite or inventive songwriting that they would go on to demonstrate on future releases. Lyrically, Yorke was still finding his voice, and while later he would learn how to be far more poetic in his choice of words, this song feels as though it was ripped straight out of his high-school diary.
Far from the cryptic storyteller he would become later on, Yorke here assumes the position of a bitter person who can’t seem to move on from the loss of a relationship. While his fantasies run riot and his high opinions of himself run even more amok, we’re treated to very little else that threatens to suggest that Radiohead would be a band worth taking note of judging by this song.
‘Sulk’ (1995)
If Radiohead’s aim with The Bends was to take everything they attempted on Pablo Honey and refine it to a point where all of its flaws were no longer weighing it down, then they largely succeeded in their mission. The one thing that prevented it from being an entirely successful overhaul of their earlier sound was the album’s inclusion of ‘Sulk’.
If ‘Sulk’ had been included on Pablo Honey, it probably would have been one of the standout tracks, and while that isn’t exactly a hard thing to achieve, it still ends up spoiling the back end of their follow-up by sounding like a bridge between the two albums. It was, in fact, the oldest song to be included on the album, having been penned by Yorke way back in 1987 as a response to the spree-killing massacre in Hungerford earlier that year, but he shelved it for many years and rewrote the lyrics so it didn’t seem insensitive in light of current affairs in the news.
‘Talk Show Host’ (1996)
OK, here’s the first possibly contentious entry on the list. It might only have ever been a B-side to their 1995 hit ‘Street Spirit (Fade Out)’, but it’s arguably one of the most famous B-sides to have ever been released by any band. The Nellee Hooper remix was heavily featured in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet movie from 1996, and this version of ‘Talk Show Host’ is often praised for its moody and downbeat take on trip-hop. However, the biggest issue that the original version of the song is faced with is how empty it sounds.
The repeating guitar motif throughout sounds so hollow and lifeless, as do the overproduced snare hits from Philip Selway. While the later inclusion of Jonny Greenwood’s more aggressive style does come through alongside some tasteful synths, the song, unfortunately, doesn’t go anywhere exciting with either element, leaving them as worthless embellishments on a drab track. How this ever became their most beloved non-album track is beyond me.
‘Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors’ (2001)
When Radiohead first began showing off their electronic and avant-garde influences in a more overt fashion on 2000’s Kid A, it was largely regarded as a marvel. Having established themselves as one of the world’s biggest rock groups prior to the release of the album, the fact that they took a complete u-turn and reinvented themselves with processed drum beats, ambient loops and soaring strings and did it so expertly on the first time of asking, is nothing short of a miracle.
But that doesn’t mean that all of their electronic experiments were worthy of being released, and ‘Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors’ doesn’t belong anywhere near a Radiohead album. Amnesiac may well have been an album of Kid A offcuts, but for the most part, they showcase the band at their creative peak. This just showcases Thom Yorke pissing around with vocoders and pitch-shifted vocals while a droning techno loop plays underneath.
‘Morning Bell/Amnesiac’ (2001)
Remember what I said about Amnesiac being an album of glorified Kid A offcuts? If you ever needed more proof of that, then look to the fact that it includes an alternate version of a song that had already been released on its predecessor – in a much more superior state. The Amnesiac interpretation of ‘Morning Bell’ is by no means a bad song, but when they’d already released the definitive version of the track less than a year prior, it had no right to be featured as the centrepiece to their fifth album.
The original ‘Morning Bell’ is a krautrock track that is played in a driving 5/4 rhythm, with soft, haunting keys backing up a delicate vocal performance from Yorke. The version we’re treated to on Amnesiac almost feels like a demo version of the song before it underwent the metric change and is also seemingly a brighter-sounding iteration of the song. Guitarist Ed O’Brien explained that the band regularly recorded multiple versions of a song, which was “strong enough to bear hearing again.” Maybe it was, but not on an album.
‘Harry Patch (In Memory Of)’ (2009)
While the sentiment of the track, which pays tribute to the death of the supercentenarian World War I veteran Harry Patch, is certainly a touching one, this sombre affair doesn’t feel as though it warrants having the band’s name on it due to it being almost exclusively a Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood composition. Another confusing matter behind the song’s existence is why Yorke chose to pay tribute to such a figure despite having expressed a vehement anti-war stance in the past. The song is a curious one, and it’s far from being their most interesting change in direction.
However, if the song hadn’t existed, we wouldn’t have got to see one of the more bizarre indie rock beefs of the 2000s. In a horrifically misguided tirade, the Fiery Furnaces’ Matthew Friedberger slammed the group for “brazenly and arbitrarily associating yourself with things that you know people consider cool,” all the while thinking they’d written a song and named it after the experimental composer and inventor of the 43-tone scale, Harry Partch. Friedberger would then correct himself after the outburst, say he would have rather insulted Beck, to which Beck duly responded with his own song in tribute to Harry Partch. Baffling.
‘Give Up The Ghost’ (2011)
Radiohead’s eighth record, The King of Limbs, often gets a bad reputation, both for being their most obtuse and abstract album to date and for the fact that fans waited four years for an album that barely procured half an hour of material. You can understand why some hardcore fans of the band might feel aggrieved or undersold given how much of a roaring success In Rainbows was, but the fact is that, for the most part, The King of Limbs is a creative album with plenty of high points.
‘Give Up The Ghost’ is not one of those high points, and alongside the previous song on the album, ‘Codex’, is one of only two songs that doesn’t have its rhythm as the main focal point. For what is ostensibly their most dance and electronic-oriented record, the inclusion of this gentle folk track feels out of place more than similar cuts have done on previous Radiohead outings, and on top of that, there’s so little going on to speak of that it doesn’t stick in the memory for very long after it’s over.
‘Spectre’ (2015)
If you had ever asked the question, “what would a Radiohead James Bond theme sound like?” prior to 2016, then you might have been pleased to hear that they were approached to write one. However, the film that they were approached to write one for had already been released a year before, and they were rejected in favour of a Sam Smith number on account of the fact that their submission, ‘Spectre’, was too dreary.
Radiohead’s offering may have offered up the John Barry-esque strings and epic finale, but the funereal piano and offbeat rhythm that starts the song off is a little too reminiscent of their previous hit ‘Pyramid Song’, a track that hardly captures the essence of 007. In actual fact, the band had already been rejected once for the soundtrack, having previously had the arguably better track ‘Man of War’ turned down on account that they would be ineligible for an Academy Award for Best Original Song. Somebody clearly took issue with Radiohead being part of a Bond film, and it’s not that the band shouldn’t have released it: they needn’t have wasted their time writing it.
‘Creep – Very 2021 Rmx’ (2021)
Okay, we all know ‘Creep’. We might love it and see it as a brilliant time capsule of the early ‘90s indie rock sound, or we might think it’s overplayed pop sludge that Radiohead are rightly dismissive of. What can’t be argued is that Radiohead should have released it, as without that song, they probably wouldn’t have ever achieved the level of success or improvement they did with subsequent releases, and they might not have even made it as far into their career as they did.
What didn’t ever need releasing, on the other hand, is a nine-minute, time-stretched remix of the song, where arguably the best and most famous element of the track has been removed, and listening to it becomes twice the chore it already was for those who didn’t like it in the first place. Gone is Jonny Greenwood’s chugging distortion before the chorus, and gone is any last sense of enjoyability that the song might have been clutching onto. The band might have been sick of hearing people ask for it at live shows, but this unnecessary remix of the track is nothing more than a big fuck you to everyone – fans included.
Related Topics
Radiohead