SAVE
On Tuesday morning, Radiohead released around 16 hours of OK Computer outtakes on Bandcamp, with the proceeds going to fight the climate crisis. This might have seemed strange to those not obsessively following the group, but Radiohead’s hand was essentially forced: The archival material—which includes long-sought alternate versions of “Lift” and “True Love Waits,” solo demos, and other sonic experiments—leaked online last week. How did this treasure trove of music, made more than 20 years ago by one of the most critically acclaimed bands of all time, find its way to the internet now? It involves a black-market rap leaker being outmaneuvered by one of the internet’s most active musical fanbases.
It all began a few weeks ago, on May 26, when a user called Zimbra joined a Radiohead-oriented group on the chat app Discord, known as W.A.S.T.E. Central (yes, just like Radiohead’s official social network). Though this person’s entire presence in the Discord group has since been deleted, the initial responses to their comments make clear that Zimbra had access to and was teasing unreleased material from OK Computer. When the album was given a 20th-anniversary reissue in 2017 (subtitled OKNOTOK 1997 2017), the box set included an exclusive cassette of demos and outtakes. Zimbra, whose handle echoes a classic Talking Heads song, seemed to have more where those came from.
A little more than a week later, on June 3, a post on Reddit’s Radiohead channel sounded the alarm: A well-known leaker claimed to have 18 hours of tracks made by Thom Yorke during the recording of OK Computer. Though the post didn’t mention Zimbra by name, the leaker had shared previews of the kinds of material first teased by Zimbra, reportedly asking $150,000 for the full stash, or $800 per studio track and $50 per live track. A dubiously sourced archive documenting the making of a momentous album—a fan’s holy grail, an artist’s private rough drafts, and a copyright lawyer’s worst nightmare—was effectively being held for “ransom,” as Jonny On June 4, a user named Hoserama joined the Radiohead Discord chat. While Hoserama is the handle of a concert taper and trader who’s well known in online Radiohead circles, evidence later emerged that this user was not the longstanding Hoserama, but rather Zimbra pretending to be Hoserama. (“What if I make a Discord with that username. And then leak the entire thing as him?” a screenshot of an apparent chat log with Zimbra reads.) “Told you I’d be back,” this fake Hoserama posted last week, along with a link to a site hosting a 1.38-gigabyte cache of the outtakes in question—more than 17 hours’ worth. “More soon,” he promised, before quitting the group. later put it.
The leak spread quickly. Amid much hand-wringing over hearing tracks that were never intended for public consumption, the Radiohead fan community began compiling a Google doc that outlines the contents of these 18 lengthy audio files. John Nicholas, the Google doc’s owner, is candid with me about the moral quandary of a leak that is not sanctioned by the artist. “In the situation we were placed in, it seemed that we were approaching something on the level of the Let It Be tapes or perhaps even The Basement Tapes, considering how many unreleased Thom solo demos were in this particular set,” he writes via email. “It made more sense to convince the leaker to share something of that magnitude without making a profit off the band’s work, which would have been the outcome had we not gone public with the leaker’s info.” The fans’ Reddit post, in other words, forced the leaker’s hand.
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