Are there any classic albums that begin on a duff note?

There’s probably an exception that I’m lamentably overlooking*, but as a rule of thumb, the greatest albums of all time always start with a moment of brilliance to set you off on a glorious journey.

Yes, successively magnificent follow-up tracks can overturn the trust deficit created by a weak opener, but surely you can’t have a classic album on your hands if you find yourself forever skipping the first song?

Radiohead’s ‘Airbag’ is a great opener. You never hear any muttering morons complaining that, “The rest of OK Computer is great, but that first track is a pile of crap.” In fact it’s not just a great opener, it’s a remarkable song – something I first realised with my cousin Alex in France, in the summer of 1997, when we tried listening to the album on a stereo with only one functioning speaker and suddenly found ourselves confronted by a hitherto unnoticed cello mirroring the intro guitar line.

From there, the genius of Airbag’s arrangement became clear – from the trance-like, drone of the central chords, to the three-note, stuttering bassline, endlessly repeating itself, to the weird and wonderful percussive noises splintering in and out of the mix. It left me wondering how anyone could possibly conceive of such a song in the first place.

This week Radiohead have been busy reaffirming their status as the kings of disruptive marketing (and limbs) by turning an attempted act of blackmail by a minidisc hacker into a global fire-sale of 16 hours’ worth of archive material from the OK Computer era. But while it may indeed be an act of marketing genius, for me this is all about finding the answer to Airbag.

There are a dozen or so versions of the track presented across the 18 discs – from semi-acoustic demos and error-strewn early run-throughs to endless rehearsal room repetitions and iterations. Through them, we can hear a band painstaking trying to locate the song that they’re looking for.

What’s astonishing is that the earliest versions of Airbag really don’t offer up anything to get excited about. Acoustic-led and meandering, with no obvious beginning or end, the song is genuinely pedestrian, lacking in both intrigue and memorable parts.

It is going nowhere, basically. There is no way this song is ever going to be an album opener, let alone a classic opener to one of the great albums ever made.

And yet somehow the band know that they’re onto something – they can sense something that we cannot yet hear. So they keep going, always one step ahead of the listener, until the song starts to reveal itself.

More than 20 years since I first discovered its secret cello, I have once again renewed my respect for Airbag. Other prominent tracks in the minidisc archive, like ‘I Promise’ and ‘Lift’, didn’t make the cut for OK Computer, despite the band’s obvious enthusiasm for them. Others, like ‘True Love Waits’, were never satisfactorily located – the band has released two subsequent versions of the song and neither quite delivers on the intangible promise of its basic outline.

Airbag could easily have fallen onto the scrapheap of failed ideas or lost in the purgatory of unfulfilled potential. But somehow, miraculously, it lived to tell the tale.

In a fast German car.
I’m amazed that I survived.
An airbag saved my life.

*On further reflection, New Order’s ‘Technique’ might be the exception, but then New Order are a rather contrary sort of a band.