After kicking off in New Zealand last month, Thom Yorke’s Everything tour heads to Singapore and Japan next, eventually winding up in Kyoto at the end of November. The shows have seen the Radiohead frontman tap into material from right across his career and myriad projects, from the Oxford art-rock titans with which he made his name to songs recorded recently with The Smile alongside solo tracks and soundtrack work. But one song you imagine he won’t be airing is Pop Is Dead, a 1993 single that the band have all but disowned.
The song, recorded during the sessions for the band’s debut Pablo Honey but put out as a standalone release a few months later, is a crunching, seething and quite silly alt-rock track raging against music industry machinations. At the time they made it, Yorke told Melody Maker, “I wrote Pop Is Dead as a kind of epitaph to 1992. Hence the lines, “Pop is dead/died an ugly death by catalogue.”
The irony is that you will no longer find it amongst Radiohead’s back catalogue, with the song not featuring on any streaming platforms and conspicuously absent from their otherwise comprehensive online archive the Radiohead Public Library.
One reason for its removal can be explained in a 2003 interview the group conducted with Zane Lowe ahead of the release of their sixth album Hail To The Thief. They basically hate it. Asked what the one piece of advice the band would give their 1991 selves, Yorke responded. “Don’t release Pop Is Dead!”, with guitarist Ed O’Brien also describing the song as a “hideous mistake”.
Of course, the internet is the internet and Pop Is Dead hasn’t entirely been scrubbed from existence. This live version, for instance, features as part of their Live At The Astoria release from 1994:
Whilst unofficial accounts have posted the recorded version, which you can listen to here:
Unfortunately, the song’s official promo clip, featuring Thom Yorke as a vampire being carried around in a glass coffin remains AWOL.
