In the second half of 2009, from what I remember, I wasn’t
excessively happy or sad. Let’s call it a rung or two above ho-hum, which isn’t
all that terrible a place to be in. So when I look back fondly at the time, it
has nothing to do with anything except that I was eight years younger then than
I am now. At the time, I used to own a shitty Acer Macbook, and I was in
between earphones. The iPod ones I had had stopped working, and I was yet to
buy these really cool Sennheiser earphones I used to own — they were going out
of production soon so shops were getting rid of existing stock at 1000 instead
of the listed 4000 (sorry, “999” instead of “3999”). The only way I had of
listening to music was through the crackling speakers of my Macbook.
One particular (late, late) evening (or early, early
morning), in the middle of a depressingly drawn-out YouTube spiral, I discovered
what is now called ‘Man Of War’ by Radiohead. It was a live recording, and the
guitar bit at the beginning of the song was really pretty and exactly what I’d
been looking for at that particular time. The song finished and I didn’t know
what to make of it, except that I’d been sucked in. It takes its time to
properly settle in, as all the different elements start to ‘show themselves’ only
later. Instinctively, all I could tell was something meaningful was going on. Plus
I was little freaked — it’s one of those songs that attacks you from the precise
point where your peripheral vision ends.
Thom Yorke, to me, seemed to be singing the moody
words almost reluctantly, slowly easing into the big melodies that linger in
the air once it finishes. It reminded me of my food conservatism, where I’ll resist
trying out something new to the point of extreme annoyance, before I finally
taste it and then my stomach explodes after overeating. The guitars, though,
were the real draw. The three guitars appear to be playing roughly the same
thing, bouncing off of each other and taking minor deviations to add fullness
to the atmosphere. It’s only on further scrutiny that you realise that there
comes a point where they’re only superficially holding hands, before departing
in their own distinct directions, which is when the song detonates. It’s
thrilling.
Anyway, so I may have become slightly obsessed with
the song. The live version was literally on loop for the next three days — every
waking minute was spent fighting the YouTube autoplay feature (if it existed
back then; I don’t remember). Side by side, I was trying to suck all joy from
the song in spite of my audiophobe setup. For a week after, it still remained sort
of on loop, after which it dropped in and out of my consciousness every few years.
The name, though, was a problem.
The obsession didn’t come immediately. Before that was
the process of finding the song a second time. First time was accidental, and when
I tried searching for it again, I couldn’t find it. All I remembered was the “man
of war” lyric. But the song was tagged as ‘Big Boots’ everywhere, which I hadn’t
known at the time, because I never pay
attention to song names. So I went through a rigorous process of listening to
hundreds of B-sides and live versions of unreleased Radiohead songs before I finally
found it. Which is why I was hesitant to ever call it ‘Man Of War’ — I was scarred
from all the digital and emotional labour, not to mention the association with the
metal band Manowar.
The problem, then, became a postmodern one. Radiohead had
another unreleased song, known in fan
circles, as ‘Big Ideas’, with “I don’t got any” in parenthesis. Of course I kept
confusing the two. I didn’t exactly love
‘Big Ideas’— a song that had become ‘Nude’ by then I think — so I convinced
myself that I had imagined the initial thrill I felt on listening ‘Big Boots’.
In my head, ‘Big Boots’ didn’t exist anymore, which was very upsetting. Until I
finally discovered it, an unfettered release.
A lot of fans had been waiting for a studio version of
‘True Love Waits’, which finally came out last year. My ‘True Love Waits’,
though, had always been ‘Big Boots’. Now that it’s finally here, the only things
I recognise from the live version (even though it’s exactly the same) are the easy
melodies and the sideways attack. Even the attack has been amplified in the
production.
But for the most part, even though I share a big long
history with ‘Big Boots’, and the (over)familiarity is part of why I’ve already
become re-obsessed with the song, it still functions, simultaneously, as a whole
new entity. How exciting is that? Yes, I think it’d have slotted right in to
the narrative of OK Computer
effortlessly, and its presence may have elevated OKC even further. But then, I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to
discover, all over again, this 25-year-old song in 2017.
