1.Go to Sleep (3:22) 2.I Am Citizen Insane (3:30) 3.Fog (again) [live] (2:17)
When this single came out, my CD player was broken, an apparent victim of our house move. For this reason, seeing a copy of the 12" format displayed prominently in a shop was very enticing; until I spotted that this format picked one B-side from each of the CD singles, meaning that I'd still need to pay for both of those if I wanted to own the other two tracks. In the end, I picked up this one CD alongside a pair of sunglasses in Woolworths. Sadly, I lost the sunglasses soon afterwards, only to find they'd stopped selling them. I still have the single though.
Go to Sleep itself is, of course, the second selection from the moderately successful Hail to the Thief album. Lacking the majesty of its Top Five predecessor 'There There', it's almost the album in microcosm - partly a return to their rock roots, partly a wilful racket. It starts with an ominous but oddly lush-sounding rank of big acuostic guitars, with Thom Yorke singing impressionistic imagery over the top: "Something for the rag & bone man/Over my dead body". At a rough guess, the lyrics have something to do with political apathy, a major topic on the album.
As the song progresses, we hear a suitably eerie but stable bass rumble and the entrance of Jonny Greenwood's electric guitar, revisting the territory of the first classic Radiohead album, The Bends. Any hopes that this will be the new 'Just' are to be dashed though; although the playing and the mood become increasingly frenetic the song lacks (perhaps intentionally) the melodic drive of the group's most popular work. It seems to start fading out around the two-minute mark, changes its mind and begins to drift on. The last minute or so consists of the band playing the tune as a rock-solid jazz groove, with shards of Greenwood's scathing guitar over the top, as the track really does fade in a slightly disappointing way. The slightly empty feeling it leaves you with may be deliberate, of course.
It's harder to be positive about I Am Citizen Insane. Indeed, it's hard to say anything very much about it - it's really just a directionless electronic doodle, probably made entirely by Yorke on his laptop, although writing and production are, as ever, credited democratically to the entire band.
This was one of the tracks on the 12" single, alongside its near-namesake 'I Am a Wicked Child', which I'm told is an entirely different and more interesting kind of song, also to be heard on the second CD format. Apparently this CD was issued in Canada, and CD2 was released in the USA(!).
Finally, we reach the track that led me to choose this format. Fog circulated for some years as a bootleg, normally under the title 'Alligators in New York Sewers' (drawn from the lyric). Some fans were disappointed not to find it on Kid A or Amnesiac, but it first saw official release, under its new title, on the second CD of 'Knives Out'. I didn't buy that one, though, so I decided to pick up this new version, recorded live on the French TV show Music Planet 2Nite. It's a different and simpler arrangement with Yorke backed only by a piano, offering up a performance best described as "intense" but also oddly distant, as if the song is only a puff of smoke you can't take hold of. Suddenly, after less than two minutes, Yorke says "Goodnight everybody. Thank you." (in English!) and it's all over bar the applause.
The best legal sample of the original 'Fog' I could find was at amazon.com.
One other welcome thing about this record is that it's in a proper case. Not quite the glamorous jewel case with free print that held 'There There' but at least an advance on the "lose-it-in-your-rack" card sleeves that Radiohead had used for the previous few years. The packaging is also noteworthy because the artwork - a detail from the "map" in the limited-edition version of the album - omits all title and artist details from the front, and the inevitable sticker wraps around the spine to supply the song title which would otherwise be absent. This is, presumably, supposed to be some very clever piece of symbolism from Stanley Donwood.
Both B-sides from this single, and indeed all the other B-sides associated with Hail to the Thief are now available on the compilation Com Lag: 2+2=5. And it'd be easier to persuade myself to buy that if I didn't already have this. Oh well.
I don't normally bother updating these things, but it just so happens that within days of uploading this, I found a copy of Knives Out CD2 in Virgin's closing-down sale. I can confirm that it is a longer and more electronic rendition. I still wasn't sure whether or not to mention this but then I noticed a spelling mistake, and that I'd incorrectly recorded the chart position. Ooops.
ONLINE:
Official site - not for the impatient.
The band also offer a selection of webcasts at The Most Gigantic Lying Mouth of All Time, though they elude this computer.
Much as one hates to reinforce stereotypes about fans, it's a fact that Radiohead have attracted more fansites than almost any band of their generation. Possibly the most informative are At Ease
and Green Plastic Radiohead.
Back to the random single project