Radiohead will mark the 20th anniversary of OK Computer with OKNOTOK – a bumper release featuring a remastered version of the original record, as well as B-sides and three previously unreleased tracks.
Released on 23 June through XL Recordings, OKNOTOK will include eight B-sides in total, as well as fan favourites – I Promise, Lift and Man of War, formerly known as Big Boots – tracks played frequently during their 1996 tours and considered “lost” classics from the Radiohead vault. A press release describes the collection of archive songs as “rescued from defunct formats, prised from dark cupboards and brought to light after two decades in cold storage”.
Rumours of the anniversary edition of the 1997 album have been spreading since OK Computer-style posters were spotted around the world last week, and a new video, posted by the band on social media on 1 May, revealed an eerie image of a flickering computer screen, while the voice of a young girl recites the lyrics to a slightly altered version of OK Computer’s Climbing Up the Walls.
Radiohead fans have come to expect a reworked archive song on each album – A Moon Shaped Pool featured True Love Waits from 1995, for example. In 2016, Jonny Greenwood told Dutch website 3voor12 that the band had been working on Lift, with their manager tipping off the interviewer about the emergence of this track. “He really said that? It’s a ‘management favourite’. 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.”
Those who purchase the physical “boxed” release get a hardcover book containing more than 30 artworks, some of which have never been seen before. It will also include a notebook containing 104 pages from Thom Yorke’s library of scrawled notes of the time, a sketchbook containing 48 pages of Donwood and Tchock’s “preparatory work” and a C90 cassette mixtape compiled by the band, taken from OK Computer session archives and demo tapes.
