Radiohead is turning back the clock for a look at material from its 2003 album Hail to the Thief, in-concert versions of which have been assembled for the just-released digital collection Hail to the Thief Live Recordings 2003-2009.
Mixed by Ben Baptie and mastered by Matt Colton, the project will also be available in a one-off vinyl pressing on Oct. 31 from the Thom Yorke-led band’s online store. Radiohead has shared a live video of “There, There” from a 2009 Buenos Aires to mark the occasion; the rest of the songs were pulled from shows in London, Amsterdam and Dublin.
As Will Hermes wrote for SPIN at the time, “Hail to the Thief is driven by psychic stress — in this case, the strain placed on people of conscience by a world in which so-called democracies bum-rush the electoral process and attack nations in lieu of practicing diplomacy. Beginning with its title (a common George W. Bush-dissing protest-poster slogan), the record is filled with war-haunted narrators ready to sandbag and hide (‘2+2=5’) or lie down in a bunker (‘I Will’). Some of them imagine walking amid bullets (‘Scatterbrain’) and dragging out their dead (‘A Wolf at the Door’); others want to suck your blood or eat you alive. And naysayers are powerless. ‘We tried, but there was nothing we could do,’ croons Yorke on “Backdrifts,’ a conspiracy blues riding antsy digital beats. ‘All tapes have been erased.’”
“If the motivation for naming our album had been based solely on the U.S. election, I’d find that to be pretty shallow,” Yorke told SPIN in 2003. “To me, it’s about forces that aren’t necessarily human, forces that are creating this climate of fear. While making this record, I became obsessed with how certain people are able to inflict incredible pain on others while believing they’re doing the right thing. They’re taking people’s souls from them before they’re even dead. My girlfriend—she’s a Dante expert—told me that was Dante’s theory about authority. I was just overcome with all this fear and darkness. And that fear is the ‘thief.’”
Yorke was inspired to release these recordings while working on a newfangled version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet set to music from Hail to the Thief. “I asked to hear some archive live recordings of the songs [and] I was shocked by the kind of energy behind the way we played,” he says. “I barely recognized us, and it helped me find a way forward. We decided to get these live recordings mixed and released (it would have been insane to keep them for ourselves). It has all been a very cathartic process. We very much hope you enjoy them.”
Radiohead hasn’t performed live since 2018, but there are rumors the band may be returning to live activity more sooner than later. As for Yorke, he recently contributed the song “Dialing In” as the opening theme for the Apple TV+ crime series Smoke.
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