I will see you in the next life

Radiohead - 'Motion Picture Soundtrack' / 'Untitled' (Kid A - 2000)

In 2017 Charlie Thompson produced some analysis of Radiohead’s album tracks, which by 2016 was a round century of songs. He looked at the Spotify Audio Features in much the same way we have to assess which is the gloomiest song by the Oxford quintet and produce a gloom index.

That work concluded until the release of The King of Limbs track ‘Give Up The Ghost’ in 2011, and eventually, the studio version of ‘True Love Waits’ on A Moon Shaped Pool five years later, ‘Motion Picture Soundtrack’ is Radiohead’s gloomiest song rivalled only by ‘Pyramid Song’, ‘Exit Music (For A Film)’ and a closer we have already covered from In Rainbows.

This is one for the good days

It is no surprise that there is a deathly tinge to these songs - it is a gloomy subject with little to rival it - what is more noteworthy is that the writing of this mournful ballad took place around the same time as ‘Creep’, an early contender of many for gloomiest Radiohead song. The song had even been performed as far back as 1995¹ - with an extra verse mentioning a beautiful angel - another tieback to ‘Creep’, which may not have helped the case for further work as the band tried to distance themselves from that albatross.

It was also played live in the run-up to OK Computer and after². Based on Thom Yorke’s solo piano version found in the cassette on OK Computer OKNOTOK 1997 2017, it was in contention for a spot on that album.

I wasn’t old enough to be a Radiohead fan when OK Computer arrived 25 years ago. I was very much by the time the band’s next album was due. As 1999 became 2000, the online whispers from Ed O’Brien’s diary became more exciting. 2000 was an interesting year to immerse myself in UK indie music; lots of the last few months of 1999 were about looking back at the decade, century and millennium, so returning efforts from Oasis and Richard Ashcroft flattered to deceive during the fourth wave of returning Britpop acts. Limp Bizkit and nu-metal marked the type of encroachment on UK weeklies that had led to Britpop in the first place nearly a decade before. Up until the end of the year, much of the music press, pre-The Strokes, was concerned with Radiohead imitation³ through the likes of Travis, Coldplay, Muse and Doves at the more popular end through to Clearlake, Mull Historical Society at the other end.

In hindsight, the most exciting things going on were the acts returning from 1998 - which Pitchfork have accurately depicted as the first musical year of the 21st century - such as OutKast or those bouncing off those ideas - Eminem, Kelis, Goldfrapp, The Avalanches and even I guess a returning Primal Scream.

Steven Hayden covers this in his book on Radiohead and the atmosphere in the music industry at the start of the millennium, This Isn’t Happening. It looks not wholly from a Radiohead or artistic perspective but the broader cultural impact, the commercial model for music and even how critics wrote about it. I would certainly recommend it to any geriatric millennial.

‘Motion Picture Soundtrack’ is an unusual rock song and Radiohead song even in the context of the career left turn of the parent album. The band haven’t been shy about using non-standard rock instrumentation such as glockenspiels, harmoniums, and on Kid A, most famously Johnny Greenwood’s use of an ondes Martenot. This song has a harp glissandi that makes a serene and attention-grabbing entrance in the second verse.

Jonny has said of the track.

Well originally Thom recorded the sound by himself just using an old pedal organ, I suppose influenced by Tom Waits and that kind of singer song writer. And I just imagined it having harps and double basses. So late one night we tried to do a version - tried to disguise the fact we don't have any harps and we are cutting up all these samples and make it all fit together. I love the sound of harps, the atmosphere we were trying to get was one of Disney films of the 50s where the colour fades slightly. I think one of the regular introductions included the fairy spinning around - a Blue Jay - and the sparks coming from behind. It was all a bit faded and watery - that was the kind of music we wanted to copy.

You can pick up that Disney-esque vibe, and Tom Waits is another artist who excels in closing a record.⁴ In other interviews, the band referenced the arrangement on The Beatles’ ‘Good Night’, the closer to The Beatles (The White Album), as an influence and the sweeping instrumentation, speed and mood of vocal delivery though not the singing,⁵ are similar.

The title ‘Motion Picture Soundtrack’ is full of cinematic possibility though it is more ‘Romeo and Juliet’ (which the band had already written a song for in ‘Exit Music (For A Film)’) than a rom-com. This is where the lyrics remind us that love and life, in general, are not like movies - not every relationship gets a Hollywood ending or redemption.

Of course, the gloominess doesn’t stop at lost love; the song’s lyrics and woozy atmosphere suggest a forthcoming drug-induced coma, whether deliberate or misadventure. Yorke manages to assure us that he will see us in the next life, but he doesn’t sing it like you might say “see you tomorrow” to a co-worker on a Tuesday evening.

In 2007, Thom Yorke was asked if the song ended with a suicide. The Radiohead vocalist replied:

No, 'Motion Picture Soundtrack' ends with little tweety angel noises, I seem to remember. [sings quietly] 'I will see you in the next life...' No, that could just be saying goodbye to someone dying. They don't have to be doing it themselves. You can read suicide into most things, can't you?

Even if this was the case, the protagonist is in lousy shape, using drink, drugs and the dull ache of nostalgia to reminisce about happier days with their lover. Potentially it is one final night of wallowing before the love letters get burnt and they turn over a new leaf - it doesn’t sound like someone ready to move on, though.

So this may not be a suicide, accidental or otherwise, but according to Yorke, someone is dying. On their next album, Amnesiac, Radiohead went even further and recorded a New Orleans-style funeral march with ‘Living In A Glass House’, but for now, they are content with the cascading harps and those angelic associations.

Whilst reading Hayden’s Kid A book shortly after the album’s 20th anniversary allowed me to wallow in nostalgia as I contemplated a time in my life when I was a teenager and developing a burgeoning interest in music and cinema, devouring the best of the century lists that seemed to dominate late 1999.

In the piece on The Beastie Boy’s Paul’s Boutique, I mentioned how music critics had a role in explaining how something sounded because the only other way to find out was to wait for it on the radio and a music channel how music critics had a role to play in explaining how something sounded because the only other way to find out was to wait for it on the radio, a music channel or buy it.

With Radiohead’s live tours in 2000, the ability to download ‘The Egyptian Song’ from a concert the previous week was there for anyone with a dial-up modem, access to the band’s deep network of fan sites and permission to tie the phone line up for half an hour during Coronation Street.

Kid A famously had minimal promotion by the band, no singles and no conventional music videos. It had blips and short animations that were sufficiently low bit-rate to quickly download and watch on the web of 20 years ago. Oddly, they were shown in adverts in the middle of Coronation Street. My generation didn’t get The Sex Pistols on Bill Grundy, Woodstock, Elvis or the Hacienda, but I did get the sound of a dial-up modem stick figures and minotaurs fighting each other for 15 seconds to the sound of ‘The National Anthem.’

You can see all of them in track order below, but the length of the ‘Motion Picture Soundtrack’ ones almost makes it a music video.

In searching for the Kid A blips, I also found this video of the funeral of Mackenzie May and a stunning performance of ‘Motion Picture Soundtrack’ that hit me in the gut as the music briefly pauses around the three-minute mark. There’s very little I can write about the video that captures the power of the song and that moment, so I’d advise you to watch it in a private space.

The power of a gap is also replicated in the album version; if you wait for a minute or so (less on streaming sites), the music starts up again and an untitled piece of music which isn’t a hidden track even though it the early 2000s Napster users tagged it as ‘Genchildren’ which sounds like the audio rendering of the ascension of a soul to heaven. To paraphrase that band, that one’s optimistic. The Kid A Mnesia reissue last year made it clear there is only one place we are heading to next, and that is the hell of Amnesiac⁶.

1. Early versions start with “White wine and sleeping pills,” which, for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on,e doesn’t seem to work as well as red wine does in the released version.

2. The 1997/8 tour versions default to Thom on acoustic guitar rather than piano.

3. More specifically, The Bends, none of these bands were channelling the bits of OK Computer which had themselves channelled Miles Davis and DJ Shadow.

4. Certainly three or four that I would like to get to eventually on here.

5. Sorry, Ringo!

6. Yorke - “It is the sound of what it feels like to be standing in the fire.” Kid A is merely the sound of observing the fire.