Each week, SPIN digs into the catalogs of great artists and highlights songs you might not know for our Deep Cut Friday series.
I remember when my older brother bought Radiohead’s Airbag / How Am I Driving? EP in the spring of 1998, and we were eager to hear more songs from the sessions that had produced their instant classic OK Computer the previous summer. Most of the tracks on the collection of B sides were quiet, meandering songs like “Meeting in the Aisle” and “Melatonin” that were probably better off left on the cutting room floor. But the EP ended with an explosively catchy song, “Palo Alto,” that thematically fit in with the album so well that it was a little hard to believe it didn’t make the cut.
In fact, “Palo Alto” had gone through a couple of earlier working titles, “Silicon Valley” and “OK Computer,” before being left off the album of the same name. Dystopian verses (“In a city of the future, it is difficult to concentrate”) build up to a big driving riff and a refrain of “I’m OK, how are you? / Thanks for asking, thanks for asking.” Perhaps, like some other very good OK Computer outtakes like “Lift” and “I Promise,” “Palo Alto” was just a little too close to the sound of 1995’s The Bends, and had to be sacrificed in order for the band’s third album to be such a deliberate and daring step forward.
Radiohead has never performed “Palo Alto” in concert, though they ran through an early version during a 1995 in-studio performance for Dutch television. In 2019, Radiohead uploaded 16 hours of unreleased demos and outtakes from the OK Computer era to Bandcamp, after a hacker had stolen the recordings and attempted to extract a ransom from the band. That flood of material included Thom Yorke’s acoustic solo demo of “Palo Alto.”
Three more essential Radiohead deep cuts:
“The Bends”
The title track from The Bends is the apex of Radiohead’s early era as a Britpop-adjacent guitar band, although Liam Gallagher once mocked the “rapping” of Thom Yorke’s staccato verses on the song.
“Morning Bell”
When Radiohead released two back-to-back albums, the only song that appeared on both 2000’s Kid A and 2001’s Amnesiac was “Morning Bell.” The first version of the song on Kid A features a taut, hypnotic 5/4 groove and some of Philip Selway’s finest drumming, while “Morning Bell/Amnesiac” features a slower 4/4 arrangement.
“Weird Fishes/Arpeggi”
“Weird Fishes/Arpeggi” wasn’t promoted as a single when In Rainbows was first released in 2007. But over the years it’s become a fan favorite that’s been covered by artists including Lianne La Havas, Phantogram, and Rodrigo y Gabriela.
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