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.”
