20 Insanely Great Radiohead Songs Only Hardcore Fans Know
Perhaps the most overtly political song that Radiohead cut prior to their Bush-era LP, Hail to the Thief, this sarcastic early B-side finds the band taking a broad swipe at the colonialist superpowers that continue to mine and mutilate certain Latin American countries (or “banana republics”) for their exports. Yorke, who would go on to become one of the music world’s most outspoken critics of agricultural exploitation, has never topped the bald facetiousness of an opening line like “Oh, Banana Co, we really love you, and we need you.” And while the song sometimes sounds like a dry run for some of the group’s more sophisticated album tracks from the same era (“Bones”), it never gets old hearing Yorke allow his vocals to sound clean enough to sell at a supermarket. D.E.
One of Radiohead’s very first B-sides — a rough version of the song appeared in their live sets as far back as 1993 — the blistering iteration with which most fans are familiar wasn’t recorded until a few years later. A three-pronged guitar jam in which the music is as blunt and panicked as the lyrics, “Killer Cars” finds Yorke taking the same physical anxieties that weaseled their way into LP cuts like “My Iron Lung” and leveraging them into a full-fledged freakout over how we take our lives into our hands every time we get behind the wheel. “I’m going out for a little drive and it could be the last time you see me alive,” raves the singer, adding a grim twist of irony to the crash-test dummy that’s plastered on the front cover of The Bends. D.E.
A fan favorite among Radiohead diehards, the soaring, sparkling “Lift” was a mainstay on Bends-era set lists, one of the last vestiges of that album’s anthemic, Brit-Pop hooks before the band embarked on a darker path with OK Computer. However, “Lift” didn’t fit with the vibe of OKC or its B-sides, and Radiohead ditched the track for nearly seven years, only to resurrect it with a slower, more restrained version during their 2002 tour.
Following the 2002 performances, “Lift” was again abandoned by the band, destined to linger among the other unsorted Radiohead songs in fans’ iTunes libraries … until last fall, when Jonny Greenwood revealed that Radiohead had worked on “Lift” again in the studio for possible inclusion on their next LP.
“It’s a ‘management-favorite,'” Greenwood said. “What people don’t know is that there’s a very old song on each album, like ‘Nude’ on In Rainbows. We never found the right arrangement for that, until then. ‘Lift’ is just like that. When the idea is right, it stays right. It doesn’t really matter in which form.” D.K.