Earlier this month, Radiohead chose to commemorate the 21st birthday of one of their most puzzled over albums to date, 2000’s Kid A, by releasing Kid A Mnesia, a box set that also piles in Kid A’s sibling album Amnesiac which was released just the next year, and features a handful of songs and mixes that didn’t quite make the cut for Kid A. The songs on Amnesiac, however, did have the chops to stand up as an album by themselves, but to round the set out, the band also added a 3rd disc of bits-and-bobs that didn’t quite make the cut for either of the records like recent single “Follow Me Around”. See the video, starring Guy Pierce, below.
The resulting 3LP, £80, 33 song unit is what we know as Kid A Mnesia. Thom Yorke and co. clearly don’t believe they’ve taken the merchandising for this project they released 21 years ago far enough though because the band have now opened the Kid A Mnesia Exhibition. As a part of this, you can visit the band’s virtual exhibition on your PS5 or PC, or just bag yourself a whole host of memorabilia, everything from badges and pins to teapots.
Upon the opening of the Kid A Mnesia gift shop, the band continue their trademark despondency with this message to fans, “Another year has passed and yet another awaits us, lurking with uncertain intent behind the deceptive glamour of the festive season. 2021 was certainly what veterans of past times might refer to as a ‘mixed bag'; turgid with inconsistency and tumescent with uncertainty. If one thing is for sure, it’s that 2022 is going to be no less disquieting. But how best to cope with these coming days of inconsistently disquieting uncertainty? Well, luckily, we at W.A.S.T.E. products have just the thing: why not take the time to browse through the KID A MNESIA EXHIBITION GIFT SHOP?”
Outside of the usual merch everyone seems to offer; t-shirts, stickers, pins, badges, blah blah blah… we also get the slightly less common (but still reasonably boring); jigsaws, water bottles, and notebooks… very nice. But the big guns, the £185 china tea sets, blinky the bear dressing gowns, and matching bed clothes… that’s what we’re after. Artist in residence Stanley Donwood has been working a lot in regard to this reissue, taking the albums art to galleries around London and also releasing a companion book “Fear Stalks the Land”. See below for further details on Donwood’s work.
KID A MNESIA and FEAR STALKS THE LAND! by @thomyorke and @StanleyDonwood are out today.
Two books of the process, artwork and lyrics of the @radiohead albums Kid A and Amnesiac.
Get them now: https://t.co/fQr5WCrydk pic.twitter.com/solITZlW1h
— Canongate (@canongatebooks) November 11, 2021
