On March 14, 1996, Radiohead performed at the Troubadour, the storied West Hollywood club with capacity for just 400 people. Beyond a setlist, little information about the gig—supposedly a secret show—survives. Still, one person who claims to have been there calls it“the most amazing Radiohead performance I’ve seen.” Back in America for the first time since mid-December, the band debuted a couple of songs that would appear on their upcoming album OK Computer, “Electioneering” and “Let Down,” and one called “Lift,” which still hasn’t been released.
Radiohead went on to play “Lift” some 30 times that year, including their huge outdoor amphitheater gigs opening for Alanis Morissette, then peaking commercially with Jagged Little Pill. Strummy and steadily building, with yearning vocals about how “today is the first day of the rest of your days,” the song named after the British word for an “elevator” was a gorgeously hopeful sign of Radiohead’s future following their sleeper-hit sophomore LP, The Bends; after all, Yorke had been saying he didn’t want to make another “miserable” record. Unsurprisingly, “Lift” was rumored as the first single from the follow-up album.
Like other live fan-favorites of the era, “Lift” was nowhere to be found on OK Computer. But similarly to “True Love Waits,” this rarity has continued to hold an important place in Radiohead lore. Over the years the group has dismissed it, reinvented it, and teased its possible return. And now, with a 20th-anniversary OK Computer reissue announced today, they’re finally releasing it. “Lift” fans, rejoice: Today is the first day of the rest of your days.
It’s tempting to imagine some alternate history where Radiohead put “Lift” on a record in 1997, gave EMI/Capitol the “radiotastic” single they expected, and, who knows, maybe transformed into a greatest-hits band rather than the quietly adventurous album act they’ve become. But for all its anthemic qualities, “Lift” was still also endearingly strange: Thom addresses himself by name, and he finishes the song by delicately scolding, “So lighten up, squirt.” Inclusive but a bit offbeat—in other words, a song Radiohead obsessives would love.
Besides “Lift” not fitting within OK Computer’s dystopian gloom, the band was simply not feeling the song. “We thought [“Lift”] was a bogshite B-side and we were very happy to leave it off the album,” guitarist Ed O’Brien told one biographer. “There wasn’t any stage where it was a key track for any of us.” The problem was, if Radiohead didn’t get an idea to click in the studio after several times through, they’d move on to something else. “The only regrets about this album are the songs we left off because we didn’t record them well enough or soon enough,” Jonny Greenwood said upon OK Computer’s release.
But O’Brien also went on to say that given people’s fondness for “Lift,” maybe the band should reevaluate their thinking on it. He left the door open to revisiting the song by way of a Police comparison: “There are a lot of bands who regurgitate old material, like ‘Message in a Bottle’ by the Police was written five years before by Sting, so there's no reason why we might not do ‘Lift’ or ‘Man-o-War’ [also known as ‘Big Boots’] later." So it couldn’t be much longer before “Lift” got its proper due, right? Obviously the answer was no: as it was, “Lift” would not have worked for the electronic experimentation of Kid A and Amnesiac.
Along the way, Yorke kept the “Lift” dream alive. “We haven’t lost the song,” he insisted around Kid A’s 2000 release, according to fansite Green Plastic. “We played it too much in a certain way that didn’t work in my opinion. It didn’t feel right. So we need to approach it in a different way, but at the time of OK Computer it was impossible to get into rearranging it because everyone had fixed ideas on what to play and we’d all just got into a habit we couldn’t break.”
With their dramatic shifts between albums, Radiohead eventually find ways to break their musical habits. In 2002, the band reimagined “Lift” for a handful of live performances, this time as a somber, almost queasy affair—a descending “Lift,” as it were. But still, as 2003’s Hail to the Thief, 2007’s In Rainbows, and 2011’s The King of Limbs all came and went, “Lift” remained left by the wayside.
Maybe “Message in a Bottle” was Radiohead’s secret muse all along, because in a 2015 interview, Greenwood returned again to the idea of the band revisiting long-shelved songs, including “management favorite” “Lift.” “What people don’t know is that there’s a very old song on each album, like ‘Nude’ on In Rainbows,” Greenwood said. “We never found the right arrangement for that, until then. ‘Lift’ is just like that. When the idea is right, it stays right. It doesn’t really matter in which form.” But when last year’sA Moon Shaped Pool included the long-awaited studio version of “True Love Waits,” yet still no “Lift,” it was easy to wonder if that right form would ever come.
True “Lift” lovers kept waiting, but now we know OKNOTOK—the bonus-filled reissue—is the place. How the finished “Lift” sounds remains to be heard, but it should be heard no later than June 23, when the new set makes its digital release. Thom Yorke, now nearly 50, telling himself on record to “lighten up, squirt” is bound to be pretty heavy.