25 Years of Radiohead's Kid A

When Radiohead released Kid A in October 2000, it marked one of the most radical artistic pivots in modern popular music. Abandoning the guitar-driven sound that had defined their rise through the 1990s, the band retreated into a fragmented world of electronic textures, cryptic composition methods, and deliberate opacity. Max Durno writes on the making, the release and the wake of Radiohead's seminal project, 25 years after its release.

It’s April 1998. Radiohead had just completed a series of over 100 concerts across the globe, touring their massive album, Ok Computer, and opening another 15 concerts for Alanis Morisette’s Jagged Little Pill tour. They find themselves home, having played to every corner of the world, having made hundreds of thousands, having been described by NME as the ‘last great sincere rock band’, and they felt …completely unhinged.  

Ok Computer had evidently soared above the already exorbitant expectations for the band’s next move after The Bends – it was hailed as visionary and pushed (or dragged) the band into global prestige. It was relieving but suffocating; Yorke told the Observer  that ‘I always used to use music as a way of moving on and dealing with things, and I sort of felt like that the thing that helped me deal with things had been sold to the highest bidder and I was simply doing its bidding. And I couldn't handle that.’ 

Over the next 3 years, very little was heard from the band – no interviews, no singles, very few photoshoots. Eventually, a handful of animations were released as promotional material for brand new album, pioneering the use of the internet for advertisement. What followed has since been considered the greatest left-turn in rock music history. Grammy winning, prestigious, debuting at number 1, ‘the greatest album of the 2000s’ according to Rolling Stone, Times and Pitchfork, and still considered the 20^th best album to have ever been recorded. On October 2^nd 2000, Radiohead released Kid A. 

In an attempt to pick up the pieces of his collapsed mental state, Yorke had turned to electronic and alternative music for the inspiration for Kid A; the likes of Warp records and Aphex Twin particularly. He became disillusioned with rock music, struggling to find fresh ideas, and where the roots of the band seemed to fall out from underneath him, the emotion and voicelessness of ...I Care Because You Do and Surfing on Sine Waves caught him. He even went as far as to move to Cornwall, exercising his newly found financial freedom, drawing cliffs and tinkering on a grand piano. Born out of this was the incredibly famous Everything in its Right Place. 

The track’s 10/4 time signature is the perfect combination of regular, comforting and alien. It exemplifies the experimentation and imperfections of the record; it feels playful and, while undisputably still Thom Yorke, incontestably new. This is what they needed. It acts as a grand open to the record, setting up the distorted vocal arrangements and nonsensical lyrics of the rest of the album, while implementing hauntingly gorgeous string lines (likely courtesy of Jonny Greenwood and his orchestral endeavours), and liminal, spacey chords. Despite having no deadline for the record, Yorke reported having severe writer’s block. This gave way to the Bowie-esque method of lyric writing – cutting up phrases from books, magazines, cookbooks and letters, and reaaranging them into random order to experiment with them in the studio. Thus, ‘yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon’. 

This studio space was eventually played by a converted barn in Oxfordshire, after having moved around from Paris to Copenhagen, producing reels of tapes – over 50, 15 minutes each – of unfinished, bare-bones recordings. In these spaces, tensions grew in the band. Working on editing recordings was a task that wasn’t very collaborative, and band-members were concerned at a being discarded from sessions, citing that ‘there were no guitars on this track’. It was here that Everything in its Right Place was recorded as you hear it today, instead of its previous trad-band arrangement. It was also here that the band took their amateur high school version of The National Anthem, and twisted it into the dystopian, grunge-y track on the record. This track was going to be on the OK Computer B-sides, but didn't make the cut. It was instead infected with radio station samples and a totally weird ring-modulating vocal piece. The stabbing brass parts are a highlight of the outstandingly groovy track, and it certainly does stand out among the clean digital soundscape of the project as funkier and grittier, though still fresh and undoubtedly unrestrained.  

Fittingly, the next track to be recorded seems to be How to Disappear Completely, an eery, depressing ode to the anxiety and terror Yorke had thrust onto himself over the past 3 years. The title comes from a book of a similar name - How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found by Doug Richmond - detailing how one could assume the persona of someone that isn’t you, someone dead, and go on in life leaving everything behind – an idea that seems reflected in Yorke’s Cornish escape. The haunting strings were recorded by a full orchestra in Dorchester Abbey, and when presented with Jonny Greenwood’s score, the orchestra laughed him out – the parts were seemingly so difficult, borderline impossible to perform, that it seemed out of the question. Eventually, the conductor suggested they experiment with the piece, playing the sheet music where possible, and working around the parts they couldn’t play. 

Idioteque was born shortly after, from another experimental session by Greenwood, handing over the hour-long improvisation that Yorke whittled down into a track that resembled ‘that exploding beat sound where you're at the club and the PA's so loud, you know it's doing damage’. It features samples from Paul Lansky’s experimental music of the 1970’s, and a drum pattern built with a modular synth. 

The final track on this album with a notable story is Motion Picture Soundtrack – a particular favourite for some. This song had been in the works for over a decade, having been written in some form before the release of Creep in 1992, some sources claim it was even written the same day as the massive hit. Influenced by Tom Waits, and the Disney sound of the 50’s, the pedal organ, harp parts and soft vocals perform a touching and gentle lulling, with lyrics dreaming of ‘getting back to you [...] where I belong’, with ‘red wine and sleeping pills’. Excessively beautiful, horrifically depressing, but altogether, a fantastic track. This track was written among others that wouldn’t be released for years, including ‘Burn the Witch and ‘Nude’, but ultimately, this is where Kid A was left.  

The brief track Untitled concludes the record, with a nostalgic hum and a fade into nothing. Other tracks like Optimistic and In Limbo are, of course, fantastic. Bombastic and creative, they only further document the bands excursion into the electronic experimentation, as does Amnesiac, their 2001 album.  

The band had written over 20 tracks by the time they were happy with the production and quality of the catalogue, over 2 hours of recordings. Rather than release all the material at once, they split the tracks by atmosphere, reserving more introspective and distinct tracks for the 2001 release. This gave people the idea that Amnesiac was a B-side style record, when I would say that I actually prefer it – it feels more raw and jazzier than its brother. But this isn’t about Amnesiac (not this article at least...). 

Having been the most highly anticipated album since Nirvana’s In Utero, journalists and critics were expecting the big punching swings of ‘Exit Music (for a film)’ and the soaring guitars of ‘Airbag’. And when they heard Kid A, well... 

They said it was shit. Basically. 

The Guardian complained about its ghostly electronic buzzes and predicted total listener confusion. Mojo’s Jim Irvin slammed it as sounding like half-baked scraps frozen in place. Adam Sweeting insisted that even hardened experimental-music fans would be left utterly bewildered, accusing the band of wallowing in their own gloom. Many reviewers wrote off the free-jazz chaos of The National Anthem as downright grating. 

But in the months following, companies like Pitchfork regressed and said it had likely confused die-hard fans of the band, suggesting that the close-minded anticipation of the record has discouraged listeners from being open to the experience. And, as you know, many followed in their path. It became a hit. While never regarded as completely original in its tone or its composition, it pushed the electronic experimental into the spotlight, and gave it a unique Radiohead bite. The divergence and total decomposition of the band and their principles had paid off. It was a hit. 

In 2021, KID A MNESIA (a deluxe version of the two records) was released, alongside a digital exhibition under the same name. The ‘exploration game’ was available for free on the Epic Games Store of all places, and detailed the musical work of the two records, alongside the extensive art of Stanley Donwood. It was intended to be a physical space, like a museum, but due to COVID-19, was transferred into the digital space – fitting considering how the original album had pioneered the internet as a medium for art. No new work was considered during the production of the exhibition, strictly the art and notes and music of the few years leading up to the album's release. I really recommend exploring it – the brutalist style of Donwood suits the uninhabitable landscape of the record, and both translate phenomenally into the physical space – it's a new way to listen to music. 

And after all the reworking, the breaking down and rebuilding from entirely different materials, the evolution from rock to electronic experimental, the ‘greatest left turn in rock history, the development of an entirely digital playable gallery, Kid A was done. 

 Written and edited by Max Durno

All photos courtesy of Radiohead and Stanley Donwood