20 Insanely Great Radiohead Songs Only Hardcore Fans Know
Rolling Stone dives into the lesser-explored crevices of Radiohead’s discography — deep album tracks, B-sides, compilation and soundtrack songs, and fan-favorite live cuts that have never seen official release — to compile a list of key obscurities. From “Follow Me Around” and “Fog” to “Worrywort” and “Lift,” here are 20 great Radiohead songs only hardcore fans know.
Perhaps the most overtly political song that Radiohead cut prior to their Bush-era LP, Hail to the Thief, this sarcastic early B-side finds the band taking a broad swipe at the colonialist superpowers that continue to mine and mutilate certain Latin American countries (or “banana republics”) for their exports. Yorke, who would go on to become one of the music world’s most outspoken critics of agricultural exploitation, has never topped the bald facetiousness of an opening line like “Oh, Banana Co, we really love you, and we need you.” And while the song sometimes sounds like a dry run for some of the group’s more sophisticated album tracks from the same era (“Bones”), it never gets old hearing Yorke allow his vocals to sound clean enough to sell at a supermarket. D.E.
The most forward-thinking track from Radiohead’s inconspicuous debut LP — the song is effectively a test-drive for “Knives Out,” which would appear four records later — “Blow Out” finds Yorke warping his issues with low self-esteem into an oblique emo jam. One of the only Pablo Honey cuts that the band hasn’t been too embarrassed to play live since the mid-Nineties, the song displays the Oxford quintet’s precision as well as their penchant for sonic chaos. As the gentle cascade of guitars gives way to a squall of noise, this barnstorming album closer begins to sound like the work of a band that’s clawing at the door of their own future. D.E.
In many ways, it’s Radiohead’s greatest unreleased song — even if it eventually did show up on 2001’s I Might Be Wrong live album. A haunting, heartbreaking exploration of dependence and desperation, it’s been in the back catalog since at least 1995, and thanks to bootlegs, it became a fan favorite — just as the band shelved it for a solid five years. Due to demand, Radiohead have occasionally worked it into sets during the past decade, where it feels almost like something taken from a time capsule, a remnant of a simpler, sadder era. In the 20 years since he first wrote it, Yorke’s turned his attention towards global concerns, but every so often, it’s nice to go back to a time when he was still kind of a Creep, or at least a guy who would sing, “I’m not living/I’m just killing time” and mean it. J.M.
