By SlaveToMusic – December 2025
Gloucestershire, Winter 1999
Picture Thom Yorke walking alone in a muddy field behind Batsford studios, Gloucestershire, January 2000. It’s been raining for three straight days. He’s 31, his back wrecked from two years of OK Computer touring, eyes swollen with tears he can’t stop anymore. Nigel Godrich watches him from the control-room window and asks: “You okay?” Thom stops, turns, and says the sentence that will go down in legend:
“I can’t sing like that anymore. I can’t be that person anymore. If we make another guitar album, I’ll die.”
Then he walks back inside, sits in front of a microphone, and for the first time in his life sings in the pitched-up voice of an alien child.
That was the exact moment Radiohead erased the band they had been for ten years. And began building Kid A.
The Block, the Bonfire, the Refusal
1998-1999: OK Computer sold 7 million copies, won the Grammy for Best Alternative Album, put Radiohead on every magazine cover on earth. And almost killed them.
The tour lasted 13 months, 199 shows. Thom Yorke had panic attacks on stage, locked himself in hotel bathrooms crying for hours, started hating his own voice. Jonny Greenwood later said: “After every gig we thought: this is the last one. We can’t do this anymore.”
They came home in 1999 with a suitcase full of tapes: a guitar album provisionally titled Your Home May Be at Risk If You Do Not Keep Up Payments. They listened once, decided it was “OK Computer Part 2”, and did the most radical thing a band at that level can do:
they literally threw the tapes on the fire.
Colin Greenwood: “We put the reels in the wood-burning stove at the country house and watched them burn. It was cathartic.”
Then they started from zero.
The New Rules (or the absence of rules)
January 2000 – four different studios (England and Denmark), no plan, no track list. Rules imposed by Thom and Nigel Godrich:
- No “normal” songs (verse-chorus-verse)
- No traditional guitar solos
- If anyone plays an E minor chord, we start over
- Anything that sounds like old Radiohead gets deleted
Ed O’Brien kept a diary (later published on Dead Air Space) that reads like pure madness:
“Day 17 – Thom sang for 8 straight hours with his voice pitched two octaves up. Jonny built an Ondes Martenot that sounds like a dying insect. Phil played drums with sticks wrapped in gaffer tape. Nobody knows what we’re doing. It’s beautiful.”
Capitol/EMI received the first demos and panicked. One executive wrote an email (leaked years later): “This isn’t an album. This is career suicide.”
Radiohead responded by leaking the entire record on Napster before it was even finished.
Timeline of Creative Chaos
| Period | Location | Key Event |
|---|---|---|
| Jan–Mar 1999 | UK countryside houses | Guitar tapes burned in the fireplace |
| Sep 1999 | Paris | First sessions with Nigel – loops only |
| Jan 2000 | Gloucestershire / Copenhagen | Real recording – no track list |
| Mar 2000 | Dorchester Abbey | 16-piece jazz brass for The National Anthem |
| May 2000 | Medley Studio, Copenhagen | Final mix – Thom only listens on headphones |
| 2 Oct 2000 | Release (no singles) | Debuts at #1 in the USA |
Track-by-Track – Dissecting the Future
1. Everything in Its Right Place
Opens with a three-chord loop (C–F–G–C) Thom recorded on a Dictaphone in Paris. In the studio it becomes a jazz nightmare: loop razor-blade edited and reassembled wrong, Thom’s voice pitched an octave up live through a Kaoss Pad, Jonny adding detuned glockenspiel. No real drums. Thom in 2001: “I wanted the first thing people heard to be: these are not the Radiohead you knew.”
2. Kid A
Title track born from a phone voice memo. Voice pitched two octaves up until it sounds like an alien child, Roland TR-606 beat, Ondes Martenot wailing at 2:40. First Radiohead song with no electric guitar at all.
3. The National Anthem
Thom writes a bass line inspired by Charles Mingus (Haitian Fight Song), plays it until his fingers bleed on 10-year-old flatwounds. Jonny hires 16 jazz horn players, puts them in a deconsecrated church, tells them: “Improvise like it’s 1959 and you’re drunk.” Records 45 minutes of chaos, edits it into 4:50 of perfect anarchy. Colin: “It’s our Bitches Brew, but angrier.”
4. How to Disappear Completely
One-take at 3 a.m. Mic at the end of a 30-metre corridor, Jonny’s 24-piece string arrangement inspired by Penderecki and Arvo Pärt. Thom sings Michael Stipe’s panic-attack mantra: “I’m not here, this isn’t happening.” The song he couldn’t listen to for years afterwards.
5. Treefingers
Ed takes a recording of How to Disappear, slows it to 10 %, plays guitar with a screwdriver and violin bow for eight hours. Result: 3:42 of pure ambience. Nobody knew it would make the album.
6. Optimistic
The only “rock” song that survived the fireplace. Thom hated it (“sounds like Creed”). Nigel saved it at the last minute. Jonny adds screaming Ondes Martenot.
7. In Limbo
Prepared piano with coins and tape, Buchla modular sirens, whispered vocals. Thom: “The black heart of the album.”
8. Idioteque
Jonny finds a 40-second 1973 Paul Lansky MIDI file on an academic CD, turns it into a 128-BPM beat. Thom writes the lyrics in ten minutes watching climate-change news. First fully electronic Radiohead song on an album.
9. Morning Bell
Two different versions (Kid A and Amnesiac). Drums recorded with a mic inside the kick, real-time pitch-shifted vocals, deranged music-box glockenspiel.
10. Motion Picture Soundtrack
Last song recorded. Real harp, Thom’s most fragile voice ever, Mellotron “heaven” sounds and bird samples. “I will see you in the next life” – Thom’s goodbye to rock.
Legacy 2025 – Kid A Became the Operating System
Twenty-five years on, Kid A doesn’t sound like a 2000 album. It sounds like 2025.
Billie Eilish, 100 gecs, Black Country New Road, Charli XCX, The Japanese House – they all speak its language. Spotify’s algorithm works exactly like Thom’s random loop writing. Glitch is aesthetic, not mistake.
In 2025, with AI churning out songs in three seconds, Kid A remains the last act of human resistance. Because no model can replicate the real terror of a man walking in the rain thinking he won’t make it.
Final Emotional Note
Listen to Kid A tonight, alone, headphones, lights off.
Start with the hypnotic loop of Everything in Its Right Place and let it wash the world away. Then the alien-child voice, the drunk brass, the mantra “I’m not here”, the broken music box, the harp that says goodbye before dying.
When Motion Picture Soundtrack ends and you get those 15 seconds of silence before the CD loops back, you’ll understand one simple thing:
Kid A is not an album. It’s proof that you can burn everything you were, throw away the guitars, cry in a muddy field, and start again from zero.
And that sometimes, when you delete everything, you finally manage to tell the truth.
Twenty-five years later, that truth is still the only thing they can’t algorithm.
Thank you, Radiohead.
What’s your favourite Kid A track? Drop it in the comments. Next monster is coming soon.