Radiohead’s Kid A, nostalgia of a different kind

March 27, 2021

To those who know, they know. If you ask a Radiohead fan to describe Kid A youโ€™ll probably get a different response every time. Serene, transcendent, manic, discordant, and well, just about every other word that attempts to describe the ineffable. Pretty broad and abstract I know. However, theyโ€™ll also probably agree on one thing, the album materialised in their life during some significant emotional shift – thus the frustration trying to articulate the immense impression it left on them, the words just donโ€™t do it justice. For me, I was in my early twenties, and found myself studying on a foreign exchange semester in Toronto, Canada. Typical bumbling Brit drawing weird eyes every time I spoke, doubly weird when they heard my dodgy Brummie lilt. Needless to say, I lost myself literally in that city, walking mile upon mile of โ€˜blocksโ€™, jaywalking into near certain death but also figuratively too, How To Disappear Completely, an existential balm if ever there was one. I formed many great memories over those few months but none resonate with me today as much as drifting through the concrete thatch of Toronto in mid-winter, smiling blissfully unaware as commuterโ€™s and vehicles beeped and barked around me.

 

I wonder who will have found this album, and specifically that song, during the bizarre conditions that face the world today. โ€˜Disappearing completelyโ€™ may as well be a public service announcement. For me, itโ€™s power was the juxtaposition, the ethereal metropolis; now it finds a new home, in the bedrooms locked down, in the quarantine of society where nothing is in itโ€™s right place.

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