Amnesiac (album) - Recording

Recording

Almost all of Amnesiac was recorded in the same sessions as its predecessor, Kid A, released eight months earlier in October 2000; the album's liner notes state that "these recordings were made on location at the same as Kid A." In these sessions, held in Paris, Copenhagen and the band's hometown Oxford in 1999 and 2000, Radiohead replaced their guitar-led "anthemic" rock style with sounds influenced by electronic music, classical music, jazz and krautrock, using synthesisers, drum machines, the ondes Martenot (an early electronic instrument), strings and brass. Drummer Phil Selway described the sessions as being divided by "our old approach of all being in a room playing together and the other extreme of manufacturing music in the studio. I think Amnesiac comes out stronger in the band-arrangement way."

The sessions produced more than twenty finished tracks. Radiohead considered releasing them as a series of EPs or a double LP, but struggled to find a track listing that satisfied them. Bassist Colin Greenwood said: "We’d go in for like a week, like every day from 4 o’clock through to eleven or twelve, working on the track listings for Kid A and with all the songs that we’d recorded, desperately trying to put in the songs that are on, and we just couldn’t make an order fit." Guitarist Ed O'Brien said: "The tendency with a double album is that if there's quite dense material in there, you tend to skip it, you tend to move on. We realised that maybe at first listen it wouldn't come to you, but it warranted coming back to. It wouldn't have happened if we put it on a double album." Singer Thom Yorke said the decision to split the work into two albums was made "because they cannot run in a straight line with each other. They cancel each other out as overall finished things. They come from two different places, I think... In some weird way I think Amnesiac gives another take on Kid A, a form of explanation." The band stressed that Amnesiac was not a collection of B-sides or "leftovers" from Kid A but an album in its own right.

Only one track, "Life in a Glasshouse", was recorded after Kid A was released. In late 2000, multi-instrumentalist Jonny Greenwood wrote to jazz trumpeter Humphrey Lyttelton explaining that the band were "a bit stuck" and asking if Lyttelton and his band would play on the song. Greenwood told MOJO magazine: "We realised that we couldn't play jazz. You know, we've always been a band of great ambition with limited playing abilities." Lyttelton agreed to help after his daughter showed him Radiohead's 1997 album OK Computer.