Radiohead's "Kid A" Turns 20--Anniversary Set Speculation and Discussion

This might be a little bit impossible seeing as it was at least partially digitally recorded and mixed!

 

2000/2001 was a wealth of riches for us fans. Count me in the disappointed group to get a measly live EP instead of a massive double live album.

Fortunately around that time I found a great sounding bootleg at CD Cellar in Virginia of a Belgium 2000 gig. Of course nowadays it is much easier to find stuff on the web, but this was huge back then!

 

Definitely him. I love the last few Gorillaz records. He’s still at the top of his game

 

Yeah, I'm not left wanting for live recordings of this band. My hard drive is choked with them (I just listened to Berlin 2000 for the millionth time last night)! But there is something to be said for official releases. Maybe @markreed is right and the band just hate live albums?

 

im still thinking with all the delays going on with everything, due to pandemic. i wouldnt rule out a complete KID A/AMNESIAC box set of sorts

 

There was an interview on Rolling Stone with Ed O'Brien from April where he strongly implies that a reissue box set is coming out: How Radiohead's Ed O'Brien Found a New Beginning

"Is a Kid A/Amnesiac box set still something that might happen this year?
Umm…maybe yes? I’m not sure. To be honest with you, I know it’s the 20th anniversary. We obviously have meetings and stuff like that. If there is something good for a box set…We did it for OK Computer, and that was good, but I’m of the school of thought that goes, “If there’s something really great to be said or done or celebrated, then that’s okay. But it’s gotta be good.” I think the OK Computer thing was good. We had a couple of tracks that had never been heard.

The other thing with Kid A is there’s so much more material. With OK Computer, there might be 19 reels [of tape]. I think we got through about 80 reels of two-inch tape for Kid A and Amnesiac. There was a lot more experimentation with the songs, since we were trying to find our way. There’s lots and lots of stuff. [The question is] whether it’s any good, and I’ve got no idea. It’s not my department, really."

 

I'm with Ed in that I don't get too excited about anniversary reissues, even though I did enjoy OKNOTOK. Reason I bought it was for the demo tape, and the European pressing on black vinyl which I heard from a copy I borrowed at the library. Had the blue vinyl Euro version which is excellent except the B sides were flat compared to the Super Deluxe version.

With all that's going on with Covid, no touring possible, and since Kid A and Amnesiac are still in print in multiple formats how can anyone get excited? So I would like to see a new issue in which Kid A and Amnesiac are released as a Double CD, album, whatever. With a resequenced offering mingling the two records. I can't imagine many B sides from this era, but I could be completely wrong about that. It would seem any potential B sides all ended up on Amnesiac.

 

Personally I think lots of bands are using this time to curate their archive and plan out the retrospective box sets. It's not even as if they can rehearse let alone play live.

 

Was the live album part of their effort to finish off a multi-album contract or am I making that up? That could explain why it was only forty odd minutes - more of a contractual obligation than an effort to represent a live show.

 

They released HTTT via EMI after I Might Be Wrong

 

I wasn’t terribly into Amnesiac when it came out. Kid A blew my mind and then I felt a little let down by Amnesiac. The live record got me to reconsider that album. I remember I bought that and Joy Division - Les Bains Douches on the same day. Both of those got me to rethink bands I already loved.

 

Since the A Moon Shaped Pool days they've been steadily releasing gigs of festivals over in youtube. And they had a hand with the fanmade DVDs of the Czech Republic gig, the Haiti benifit and the Roseland Ballroom one too. All of them amazing and career spanning.

 

Yep but I had this recollection - perhaps totally falsely - that this was regarded as a way to get closer to the end of their contract.

 

There were also a few b-sides on singles, which presumably would be included:
Fast-Track
The Amazing Sounds of Orgy
Trans-Atlantic Drawl
Kinetic
Cuttooth
Worrywort
Fog
I think they are all (mostly) pretty good. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were others.

 

Interesting, I missed that comment from Ed.

Well, if there's that much material in terms of outtakes, I think it makes sense to split the sessions up, as they originally were done, between Kid A and Amnesiac, for deluxe anniversary boxes. Kid A this holidays, and Amnesiac for the holidays next year.

Maybe each is a three disc affair:

KID A:
Disc 1 - Original album
Disc 2 - Outtakes and unreleased songs
Disc 3 - Live recordings from 2000

AMNESIAC:
Disc 1 - Original album
Disc 2 - Outtakes and unreleased songs
Disc 3 - B-sides

 

Maybe they'll include "Carnival of Light"...

Oh wait, that's the other British band...

 

I always thought “Kinetic”, “Worrywort” and “Fog” were better than some than some of the stuff that made the actual cut for Amnesiac. “Cuttooth” is pretty damn good as well, as is “Orgy”.

“Drawl” and “Fast-Track” kind of sounded like half-baked doodles, but are interesting. I wonder how much more unused stuff they have from the sessions in that vein.

And I don’t know why I never realized it, but I finally recently figured out the Miles Davis song they sampled for “Kinetic”:

 

Yeah I find that Fog, Cuttooth and Orgy are all better than most Amnesiac tracks, save for Pyramid Song and I Might Be Wrong.

I'd love to see tracking sheets and a timeline of when all theses songs were recorded included in a deluxe reissue. For instance, was Knives Out actually recorded before Paranoid Android? At what stages were True Love Waits and Nude tried and abandoned? That would be cool stuff to learn about.

I'm sure there are some unreleased nuggets, but at the very least we know we have the possibility of getting outtakes/alternate versions of 31 SONGS.

The 10 on Kid A
The 11 on Amnesiac
The 7 B-sides
True Love Waits, Nude, Follow Me Around
?

 

It reminds me of U2 releasing Under A Blood Red Sky - but at least in that case a video covered almost the entire gig. The audio EP left fans wanting...

 

I’m kind of shocked to learn they were committing EVERYTHING to tape throughout the sessions. I was always under the impression these were basically laptop/protools sessions where they’d doodle around and Nigel would cut, paste and create tracks. I know Hunting Bears, for example, was created that way, based off a chunk of Ed’s session diary I read a long time ago.

 

That was a great music purchase day!

 

I would really love for there to be a Revolution In The Head-styled book about Radiohead. Much like that great Beatles book, it would chronicle all of their recording sessions in chronological order by finished song master, and spill all the details.

Funny enough, I'd heard somewhere that Thom was reading Revolution In The Head during these sessions. Found it:

Kid A (album)

 

Ah very cool!

 

Another approach that could be cool is if Radiohead just puts out a double album of outtakes, alt-mixes and unreleased songs from the Kid A/Amnesiac sessions, and calls it something else, instead of releasing this stuff as bonus tracks for the original albums reissued. I could see Thom & Co. taking a different approach to this than they did with OKNOTOK in 2017.

 

I would really like that. Would be great to get something that gives an idea of how this material evolved organically over a year and four months in the studio.