Looking back on Radiohead’s sixth album Hail To The Thief a few years after its release, Thom Yorke was surprisingly candid about where he thought it stood in the band’s illustrious catalogue. “We knew that was the lower part of the curve,” reflected the frontman. It did not take long for anyone, the band themselves included, to realise that this was not Radiohead at their imperial peak.
Another anniversary for the album rolls around this week, a yearly reminder at just what an anomaly Hail To The Thief is amongst their output. Their records usually come fully formed, belonging to a certain time and place and inhabiting their own sonic space and feel, albums to stop and immerse yourself in. Hail To The Thief felt more like a long commute. It was the one that got away, a record not without a handful of supreme moments but one that feels like it’s got a few outtakes clinging on to its undercarriage.
The band’s intentions were good. Watching how the songs from the tumultuous, stilted Kid A and Amnesiac sessions had shapeshifted and blossomed whilst they were on the road, Radiohead remembered that they were quite a nifty live proposition and sought to try and capture this handy superpower on record. You know, like a normal band.
They did this by decamping to the most un-Radiohead of places, sunny, superficial Los Angeles, to go into the studio with Godrich. “We were like, ‘Do we want to fly halfway around the world to do this?’ but it was terrific, because we worked really hard,” Yorke told Rolling Stone’s David Fricke. “We did a track a day. It was sort of like holiday camp. We went to a couple of glamorous parties, which really helped. We don’t have enough glamour in our lives. Too much news radio, not enough glamour.”
This free-spirited approach had begun the previous summer, when the other members of Radiohead received a couriered package from Yorke containing three CDs of demos, the discs titled The Gloaming, Episcoval and Hold Your Prize. This was a promising development, guitarist Ed O’Brien informed Q Magazine. “He hadn’t named CDs for five years,” he said. “It reminded me of tapes for OK Computer. It was a nostalgic thing. This is the way it used to be. It signified to me that he was ready to engage again.”
With the songs running the gamut from olde worlde, guitar-heavy Radiohead to electronic experiments, the band felt like they were embarking on a record that could connect their past and present and emerge with something new. O’Brien, for one, was keen not to repeat Amnesiac. “As a Radiohead fan, the last thing you had was Amnesiac and... I’ll be honest. I don’t like it very much,” he declared. “There are things I really don’t like about it. This time the energy is there. It’s not so cerebral, it’s more physical. This is the first time we’ve had that punky adolescence energy since The Bends.”
With the groundwork laid down in LA over two weeks, Radiohead might have thought they had finally wriggled free of their cursed trademark, where the making of every record turns into a wretched slog. But, after more sessions back home in their Oxford studio, they found out during the post-production process that no Radiohead album is without its hurdles. "This one was really fucking hard, we had massive arguments about how it was put together and mixed,” Yorke told GQ. “Making it was a piece of piss, for the first time it was really good fun to make a record... but we finished it and nobody could let go of it. There was a long sustained period during which we lived with it but it wasn't completely finished, so you get attached to versions and we had big rows about it.”
Yorke returned to the subject recently, speaking to The Observer ahead of the unveiling of Hamlet Hail To The Thief, a reimagining of Shakespeare’s classic tragedy using reworked songs and samples from the Radiohead album to create its sonic world. “I can’t really explain it, it just all turned to shit,” he recalled of the original record. “Finishing it, mixing it, was really hard and not fun at all.”
Released in June 2003, it was pretty much evident from the off that Hail To The Thief was far from a perfect Radiohead album. It was almost as if everyone was so blindsided by the fact that the first single was the majestic epic There There, where it sounded like Radiohead were happy to turn their amps on again, that no-one noticed the record contained a few proper clunkers. At 14 tracks, it was four or five songs too long (it still is), and it’s not even hard to decide what should go – We Suck Young Blood, A Punchup At A Wedding, The Gloaming, I Will, Scatterbrain… all half-baked material by Radiohead standards.
By the time they were doing the promotional rounds for their next record, the sublime In Rainbows, the band were holding their hands up. “We should have it pruned it down to 10 songs,” O’Brien confessed to Mojo. “I didn’t want three or four songs on there because I thought some of the ideas we were trying out weren’t completely finished,” said bassist Colin Greenwood.
And yet, it somehow makes it all the more sweeter that Hail To The Thief has been resurrected and revitalised for Hamlet Hail To The Thief, which has been receiving rave reviews during its original run in Manchester and opens at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon next week. The fact this was album not such an open-and-shut case left room for reinterpretation.
Yorke, who worked on the orchestrations for the play, said revisiting the material and giving it a new lease of life had been a healthy process. “For me especially, but for the other members as well. It’s been a way of claiming back what the original sentiment was. This whole thing was more open that just one idea of Hail To The Thief.”
