Releasing a new Radiohead project has felt like a significant event for years. Even though the band has proven to be one of the foundational groups in the world of rock, their music tends to fluctuate between every genre under the sun compared to how they feel at any given moment. Although the band might have had warm feelings towards some songs in the days of OK Computer and Kid A, that doesn’t mean those songs will come out traditionally.
Since their inception, the band would play potential songs live and in the studio before finally settling on an arrangement they were happy with. For the album In Rainbows, the ballad ‘Nude’ came out of a track that the band had started during OK Computer, while the live staple ‘True Love Waits’ had to spend 20 years before finally getting a studio release on A Moon Shaped Pool.
When working on Kid A, though, the band had more songs than they knew what to do with. Drawing a line in the sand between their old material and their latest project, the album boasted a heavy emphasis on electronic rhythms and Thom Yorke crafting his most enigmatic images on tracks like ‘Idioteque’ and ‘The National Anthem’.
Having enough songs left over for the follow-up Amnesiac, much of Radiohead’s fifth release features songs they began during the Kid A sessions but got left on the cutting room floor. Although most songs had a clear structure behind them in the studio, ‘Like Spinning Plates’ came out of a strange experiment when working with backwards effects.
While recording, the band started work on a song entitled ‘I Will’, which would later appear on the album Hail to The Thief. While Yorke initially wanted to scrap what they had originally worked on, he noticed that the song’s melody sounded much better when played in reverse.
Relearning the song from scratch, ‘Like Spinning Plates’ was the new piece created out of ‘I Will’, with Yorke writing new lyrics based around the backwards melody and chord sequence. While there are a handful of sonic similarities between what eventually turned up on Hail to The Thief, the chilling atmosphere behind this track is impossible to ignore.
Much like the Kid A sessions, the backwards effect makes the song sound like it doesn’t have a time signature, as if the track is floating in the air without ever touching the ground. While ‘Like Spinning Plates’ may be one of the peaks of Radiohead’s experimental projects, it wasn’t long before they started to venture towards mainstream rock again.
On subsequent albums, the band started incorporating prominent guitar licks into the mix, as if to remind all of their copycats that they could still make rock music that was unlike anything else. ‘Like Spinning Plates’ may not have been meant as one of the final experimental songs before the band returned to the heavy guitars, but it does act as a natural send-off for this period. After the glitchy sounds of ‘Everything in Its Right Place’ kicked everything off, the band created a whirlwind of sonic textures that left the listener floating through the cosmos.
