A l’époque d’Ok Computer, Radiohead commence à utiliser son site web pour mettre en ligne des textes & illustrations qui semblent décousus sur le moment, mais que l’on comprend rétrospectivement.

• Ce texte par exemple, où apparaissent des bribes de paroles de ’true love waits’ :

– et une autre référence sur une la page ’waving or drowning’ :

paranoid android. in a bar in hollywood* the centre of the western universe, standing at the bar (social drinking) after doing the talk show bit. do you want to know this ? this is what we aspire to is it ? it is dark, there is a woman opposite me o is as sociably anorexic as her poodle, she looks desolate in her make up and lost eyes, next to her her husband boyfriend is persuading a younger fleshed half his age stewardess to come back to the hills to their mansion to sample his wine. she looks t him like he’s a character in a hammer house horror. one of our friends spills a glass of wine over a vacuum packed gucci outfit complete with matching white hand bag. the witch goes crazy, we think it is fuunny. until we see the evil in her eyes. m friend is asked to leave. the gucci creature is the closest thing i have seen to the devil. the woman is possessed. i cannot sleep that night asking what we’ve got our selves into. voices talking like fax machines, hissing and spitting like demons, this is the master race. and now im part of it. anyway you didnt want to know that.motion picture the pulsing of a life support system . that’s as far as we’ve got.lull there is nothing more dull. than talking talkin about yourself. what i meant to say. im sorry that i lost control. distracted and irrelevant. the stress and the tension. coming through the keyhole when. im in lull. transport motorways and tramlines starting and then stopping taking off and landing the emptiest of feelings disapppointed peoople clinging onto bottles and when it comes its so so disappointing. True love waits are you a virgin ? every night we are haunted it paces up and down outside my room, it talks to me in its sleep. its in the tape going round and round. it stops and starts the tape machine. goes into record when it feels like it. just let it happen. just dont leave. dont leave. it waits patiently. mum left her 8 year old locked in for a week with lollipops and crisps. she had to work or forgot or something. stanley says. you, like everyone else need to feel important.

Le groupe répète la chanson lors des soundcheks d’un concert. Toutefois, la chanson ne sera pas jouée avant 2000, continuant à faire parler les fans, qui l’attendent avec impatience .

Enregistrement proposé par le webmaster de citizeninsane.eu :

Pendant la balance du Tibetan Freedom Concert, le groupe en a répété les premières mesures, et aussi le superbe riff de Jonny qui rythme la seconde moitié du morceau, et qui fait penser à la fin de Let Down. Mais rien de plus, ils ne l’ont pas jouée…

[quote align=’none’ cite=’Rolling Stones’]Speaking of new songs, guitarist Ed O’Brien confided to reporters this fall that ’I Promise’, and ’True Love Waits’, two of their unreleased songs that the band routinely play for soundchecks, and ’Motion Picture Soundtrack’, which has appeared as a final encore in the past, could end up on the new album. Furthermore, O’Brien told NME that the band had already worked on some stuff in the back of their tour bus while they were on the road for the last album.[/quote]

Phil déclare dans une interview qu’ « Elle sera définitivement sur le prochain album. Elle est dans la veine de Karma Police. »

Sur le message board du groupe, Thom Yorke laisse un message où il parle de ’true love waits’ (réclamée à corps et à cris par les fans) :
[quote align=’none’ cite=”]”nowhere land unfortunately at the moment even though i keep thinking about it… we dont know where to start having started so many times”[/quote]

Le groupe s’est remis à travailler sur la chanson, comme Ed le raconte dans le journal en ligne qu’il tient à destination des fans :
[quote align=’none’ cite=”]January 10 – January 19, 2000
happy new year and many many thanks to all you lovely cardsenders.

i think we all arrived at the studio with that same dread of starting where we left off.to plough back into the old tracks seemed like a daunting task. nigel suggested a different plan of action to ease us back into it over the next couple of weeks. the idea was to spend this time working in a completely different way ; no acoustic instruments ie any guitars,drums or vocals……everything has to be electronically generated. it means that we can’t fall back on what we’ve done before and forces us to work this equipment. it’s actually an incredible amount of fun – which is not something we’ve had in abundance over the last year or in studios in general. we’ve been working on four ’bits’ and because they are fairly abstract it will be interesting to review it in a few weeks. the important thing is that you are constantly learning even if something doesn’t necessarily work out. and actually it’s something we’ve been meaning to do for a while. again it’s the need to change the methodology in how you actually make the music – only by doing this will we actually produce stuff that sounds any different. and conversely by finding another approach to recording, it enthuses us in the way that we’ve worked together as a ’live’ band. the rehearsals last week were fantastic precisely because we had not picked up those instruments and recorded them.

this week we have cast the experimental net further afield to include material like ’true love waits’ and ’feeling pulled apart by horses’. the former has been kicking around for about four years now and each time we approached it we seemed to be going down the same old paths………it actually sounds like the start of something exciting now.

did an interesting band version of ’bombers’ which thom has attached to what i used to call ’the neil young’ song…we may play it some time later this evening.[/quote]

Ed laisse un message sur le ’message board’ de Radiohead.com, où il parle de True Love Waits :
[quote align=’none’ cite=”]has been kicking around for about four years now and each time we approached it we seemed to be going down the same old paths… it actually sounds like the start of something now.
Nigel Godrich, le producteur, laisse lui aussi un message :
[quote ]coming, coming….. we were doing that today actually.[/quote]
[/quote]

Sur le message board, Thom explique les paroles « I’ll dress like your niece » :
[quote align=’none’ cite=”]the difference between young and old when people start to dress sensible and act their age. this person is offering not to do that to keep the other. alles klarr ?[/quote]

Ed parle à nouveau de la chanson dans son journal en ligne :
[quote align=’none’ cite=”]February 9, 2000
put ’true love waits’ up again….this is a song which has been kicking around for four years or so, in fact we recorded a version of it when we were making the last album and this is something like approach number 561. but it is a great song…..it’s simply trying to find a way of doing it which excites us. and we may have found a way, at the very least we’ve found a new approach …….. basically the track has the same vocal melody but the chords have changed underneath it. so we’ll come back to it and see how it sounds. it may of course be utter crap and we have so lost the plot on this song……………please don’t let that be the case……..[/quote]

Thom revient sur le message board du site sur les paroles « Des sucettes et des chips. » :
[quote align=’none’ cite=”]i read an article about a child who was between 5-8 yrs old who was left on his/her own for a week in a house when his parents left on hoilday and he lived on lollipops on crisps. true.[/quote]

Le groupe joue la chanson lors d’un concert à Tel Aviv, sous le titre de « true love waits ». Les fans l’attendaient depuis 5 ans !

Dans un article consacré à Phil Selway (que l’on peut lire là : http://www.thenitmustbetrue.com/rad…), on trouve un petit échange qui montre à quel point le groupe n’arrive pas à faire sonner la chanson en groupe :
[quote align=’none’ cite=”]« Will you guys ever do ’True Love Waits’ again live, or put it out as a B-side or anything ? »

He gasps in disbelief. « That’s bizarre—somebody else asked this question earlier on ! »

This topic is something that a only veritable Radiohead freak would bring up ; it refers to a song performed live by Radiohead only one time ever (Brussels, 1995, which doesn’t count Thom’s solo acoustic performance of it in Israel, 2000). The bootleg of it is so stunning that fans have been clamoring for it ever since.

I reply confidently, « You know, everyone loves this song so much—they just want to hear it ! » Phil chuckles, then pauses before delivering a carefully thought-out response. He does this during our entire conversation—takes the time to think about things before they leave his mouth, and as a result is a charming and eloquent speaker.

« We’ve not been able to do justice to it yet as a band, » he says earnestly. « When we’ve got a good version—a good band version—then we will no doubt make it into a record. »[/quote]

Durant l’année 2001, le groupe joue 7 fois la chanson en concert :

• le 1 août à Chicago :
  

• le 2 octobre à Tokyo :
  

Sortie de ’true Love Waits Live Recordings’, un album d’enregistrements live des chansons de Radiohead. La 8^e piste est un enregistrement de « True Love Waits », jouée à Los Angeles en août 2001 et remixé par Jim Warren.

Pas de version studio, comme les fans l’attendent, mais une très belle version live de la chanson.

La chanson est jouée deux fois en concert en 2002.

Le 27 octobre 2002, Thom la joue seul à la guitare acoustique :

La chanson est jouée 5 fois en live, comme ici à New York :

Les fans l’attendent toujours avec impatience, elle est réclamée !

Quelques artworks disséminés sur le site officiel rappelent la phrase fétiche de beaucoup de fans de la chanson :

Stanley Donwood semblait toujours avoir en tête cette magnifique chanson, puisqu’au détour d’une de ses illustrations pour Dead Children Playing, le catalogue de son exposition à Barcelone on retrouve des références à la chanson.