Friday, June 23, 2017

Some day you will find me/Caught beneath the landslide/In a champagne supernova in the sky



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.



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