Trivia / OK Computer

• Author Phobia: Both "Airbag" and "Lucky" were inspired by Thom Yorke's fear of motorized transport, itself the result of surviving a serious car crash prior to the formation of Radiohead.
• Breakthrough Hit: Saved Radiohead from One-Hit Wonder status and made them one of the most popular music acts of the late 20th/early 21st century.
• Bury Your Art: An Animated Music Video for "Let Down" was created by Simon Hilton, only to be rejected by the band because they didn't like how it turned out, with Thom Yorke outright calling it "shite." Hilton eventually made the video available on his website, but eventually took it down for unspecified reasons; despite this, fan reuploads can be found online.
• Cut Song: The three "new" songs on OKNOTOK — "I Promise", "Man of War", and "Lift" — were all previously outtakes from the OK Computer sessions. "Lift" in particular was the original leadoff single for the 1997 album, but difficulties with creating a satisfactory version led to it being left off back then.
• Genre-Killer: Along with the monumental levels of Hype Backlash towards Oasis' Be Here Now later that year, the success of OK Computer is credited with instigating the end of the Britpop movement that had taken the British music scene by storm during the 1990's, instead popularizing a gloomier, populist, more atmospheric style of rock music that would later become more common in rock in place of Britpop. The bands that survived Britpop's fall and Radiohead's rise were the ones that either moved away from the genre (such as Blur and Manic Street Preachers), were too big to fail (Oasis kept having hits afterward, but were never as insurmountably huge again) or were unique enough that they were barely Britpop to begin with and could simply detach themselves from whatever Britpop trappings they had picked up (namely Stereolab and The Divine Comedy).
• Genre Turning Point: The album's immense success moved Alternative Rock out of Britpop and grunge, the latter of which was on life support by '97, and into a more melancholic and electronic direction. 1998 alone saw three of alt-rock's biggest acts shift to electronic rock, and much of the post-Britpop movement in the 2000s would take heavy influence from Radiohead thanks to OK Computer.
• Referenced by...: In Yellowjackets, "Climbing Up the Walls" is used to underscore the scene where the Yellowjackets cannibalize Jackie's accidentally roasted corpse.
• Short Run in Peru: The album released in Japan 26 days before coming out in the band's native UK (May 21 vs. June 16).
• What Could Have Been:
  • The original plan for the album's promotional cycle was to create music videos for every track on the record. However, according to Grant Gee (who directed the "No Surprises" video), the idea was scrapped after "Paranoid Android" and "Karma Police" went over-budget.
  • "Fitter Happier" was at one point considered for the album's opening track; it was ultimately placed in the middle after the band decided that it was too unsettling as the opener.
  • "Lift" was originally included within the earliest drafts of OK Computer, and was planned to be the album's lead single. However, the pressure this position caused resulted in the band abandoning the track, feeling that their studio arrangement of it was unsatisfactory; they'd revisit again in multiple forms over the years before eventually including a studio version on OKNOTOK, with earlier demos also appearing on MiniDiscs [Hacked]. The band themselves speculate that had the song been released back in 1997, it would've been their "second 'Creep'" and blown their popularity up to a level they wouldn't have been able to handle.
  • "Man of War" was demoed early in the album's development, and was worked on in 1998 as a potential song for the The Avengers soundtrack (as seen in Meeting People is Easy), but Thom Yorke's Creator Breakdown led to the sessions being abandoned. The band would revisit it again in the 2010s as the theme song to Spectre, only for it to be turned down on the grounds that it wasn't written specifically for the film and thus wouldn't be eligible for a "Best Original Song" Oscar (Radiohead's next submission, a Title Track for Spectre, was also turned down for being too unfitting). "Man of War" would ultimately appear as one of the three previously unreleased songs on OKNOTOK instead.

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