An accident that’s been waiting to happen since 2003: the sound of Radiohead onstage, five madmen attacking the Hail to the Thief songbook. The British rock kingpins’ new Hail to the Thief (Live Recordings 2003-2009) is basically a track-for-track remake of their politically charged 2003 prog-punk gem, except with live versions, culled from different tours across six years. Since Radiohead rampaged through the 2000s as the planet’s most ferocious live band, a fire-breathing five-headed rock behemoth, it’s no surprise the performances are across-the-board great, taken from Dublin, Amsterdam, London, and Buenos Aires.
Hail to the Thief is an outlier in the Radiohead story — it’s the album you can always mention in a bar to get an argument started. Nobody really disagrees about the merits of Kid A or The Bends, but you can argue all night about Hail to the Thief, which is part of the fun. For some of us “There There” will always be the definitive Radiohead classic, the song you’d play for a visiting Martian who asked what this band was all about. There’s nothing like the electric jolt of excitement that whipped through the crowd every night at the sight of the roadies wheeling out those “There There” drums for Jonny Greenwood and Ed O’Brien to bang.
According to Thom Yorke, the inspiration for the new live package was Hamlet Hail to the Thief, a London theater production blending the Shakespeare play with the Radiohead album, fusing four centuries of murderous political dystopia. “I asked to hear some archive live recordings of the songs,” Yorke said. “I was shocked by the kind of energy behind the way we played. 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.”
It’s welcome news to see Thom Yorke suddenly remembering that there once was a band called Radiohead, and that they were actually very good at playing music. But he’s right: it would have been insane not to let the world hear this. It makes you hope there’s much more to come, since we have to presume Mr. Yorke did not immerse himself in six years’ worth of such glorious live work to conclude, “Eureka! We should release exactly 47 minutes of this.”
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Hail to the Thief dropped in the summer of 2003, while the world was still reeling from the one-two punch of Kid A and Amnesiac. Everything about it is divisive. It’s their longest album, nearly an hour, but hardly diffuse, since it has a linear hard-rocking momentum unlike anything else in their catalog. It’s got their most succinct skull-crush rage bombs, like “2 + 2 = 5” and “Myxomatosis” — the most punk album they ever made.
The band didn’t play coy about the political anger fueling the album with a title plucked right from the headlines, after the Supreme Court’s Bush vs. Gore coup of Dec. 12, 2000, blocking the state of Florida from counting its ballots and delivering the White House to the losing candidate. The loud, mean songs do justice to the political fury, but so do ominously quiet moments like “I Will.” The new live album cuts two tracks from the original studio album, “Backdrifts” and “A Punchup at a Wedding,” to bring it down to vinyl length, with 12 songs in 47 minutes. The vinyl version drops on Oct. 31.
The weirdest thing about this album? It’s only the second Radiohead live album — the first was I Might Be Wrong, from 2001, before Hail to the Thief even happened, and that was just eight songs. They also did their 2007 basement webcasts of In Rainbows (with killer versions of the Smiths’ “The Headmasters Ritual” and the Joy Division/New Order stalwart “Ceremony”), plus the less successful From the Basement reprise for The King of Limbs. But considering the collective magic that Radiohead made happen onstage, tour after tour, all through the 2000s, it’s a puzzle there haven’t been more archival releases like this. You’d have a tough time naming another 21st-century live band this legendary who’ve let their peak glory years go so underdocumented.
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It’s surprising this album skims over such a wide range of time, rather than (say) focusing on their furious 2003 Hail to the Thief tour, a run never forgotten by anyone who witnessed it. (NYC’s Madison Square Garden, 10/09/03 — damn good night.) Most curiously, they’ve never done a deep dive on their 2008 In Rainbows summer jaunt, a night-by-night serial epic that was followed long-distance by freaks across the world, via mp3 blogs. If you were a music fan that year, one of your joys in life was packing your iPod full of these absolutely bonkers shows. An anthology just devoted to that tour’s nightly “National Anthem” or “There There” excursions would be a keeper in itself.
Radiohead previously released Kid A Mnesia in 2021, a reissue package celebrating the 20-year anniversaries of Kid A and Amnesiac, after doing the same for OK Computer with 2017’s OKNOTOK 1997 2017. Yorke is also showing his first museum exhibit as a visual artist, This Is What You Get, in his hometown of Oxford, England. But these Live Recordings give hope that the band might finally open up some of the live treasures currently gathering dust in the vaults. If revisiting these songs was “very cathartic” for Yorke, there’s even more greatness where this came from.
