Hidden But Not Forgotten: The Stylus Magazine Non-Definitive History of the Hidden Track

Stylus Staff

Wish You Weren’t Here — Less Than Stellar Examples


Radiohead’Kid A

Described by Stylus honcho Todd L. Burns as “a cleansing gesture, sort of like a mint after dinner at a nice restaurant.” Given that I wasn’t too impressed with the main course, I’m not inclined to agree; it’s perhaps the most pointless of pointless hidden tracks. Maybe someday I’ll think otherwise, but for now, so many aspects of this record are just tired and by- the-numbers (right down to the “hidden” artwork under the CD tray). Like some of us feel about the rest of Kid A, the orchestral swells at the end of the record are particularly meaningless and boring. And if that’s the point, it’s not worth the effort. Significant for being the definitively tired and pretentious example of the device.
Matthew Weiner


The Stone Roses — Second Coming

The Stone Roses spent five years dividing their time between court rooms, mountain biking and taking lots of drugs after the release of their seminal debut album, so its not surprising that they only had time to write eleven new songs for Second Coming. That wasn’t going to deter them from making it a mammoth 99-track monster though! So immediately after the monolithic black-female-Jesus swamp blues of “Love Spreads” passes away, we’re gifted with 78 consecutive 3-second passages of absolute, mind-numbing silence. Marvellous! Surely after the feat of endurance that is either listening to them or else wearing out your thumb pressing “skip”, we were in for some fantastic reward, the lost chord maybe, hidden away at the end of the burnt-out Mancs sophomore LP? But no, what we actually get is nigh-on six minutes of the band, pissed as farts, banging pianos and tambourines whilst one of them rapes a fiddle. There’s a tune of sorts emerging if you can stomach the atonal clatter for more than a few seconds, but seeing as none of the band are particularly versed in the piano or fiddle (or particularly sober either, by the sound of things) it’s hardly illuminating stuff. At the end you can clearly hear someone tearing a sheet of paper in two next to the mic before hawking up a fucking great big greenie. And then we get another nine 3-second snippets of nothingness (which, incidentally, mean that it takes your CD player ages to read the track information from the disc when you first put it in). Five years for this? Cheers, lads.
Nick Southall


Nine Inch Nails - Broken

I can sympathize with Nick here- my index finger and thumb became sore as I peered down at the digital display of the CD player- 58, 59, 60- “this better be worth it’” And, of course, it wasn’t. By the time I had gotten to 98 maybe I was in a bad mood. But, a slow and plodding cover version of Adam Ant’s ’(You’re So) Physical’ that transforms the original version into one of insular paranoia- the lyrics sound as if they’re being spit out in disgust was not exactly what I wanted to hear. As an impressionable teenager, it was my bitter introduction to the impatience of waiting for the surprise- either disappointing or glorious- of the hidden track. Oh- and there’s another track- but that one was even worse.
Todd Burns


The Verve — Urban Hymns

As if Urban Hymns wasn’t already enough of a fucking travesty of a record, the musical equivalent of shitting your own pants in public, “mad” (in the sense that he’s a twat) Dickie Ashcroft had some piddling, widdly babies-in-space instrumental grafted onto the backside of this record like an anal wart on an already pile-ridden sphincter. After the transcendent space-rock ambience of “A Storm In Heaven” (no hidden track) and the hyper-charged emotionally-fraught death-fuck-rock of A Northern Soul (also no hidden track), Urban Hymns’ anaemic blend of plod-rock balladeering, widdly prog aesthetics and one moment of utter transcendence (“Bitter Sweet Symphony,” lest we forget) was utterly, catastrophically crap. To add this insipid, pretentiously impotent jangle (plus the sound of a baby crying! Oh, how spiritual) to an already shite album is just one insult too many. A fucking baby crying over some spacey jingle-jangle! I mean, COME ON!?
Nick Southall


Mercury Rev — Deserter’s Songs

Ah, how far they fall. Only seven years after the brilliance of Yerself Is Steam, the Rev conclude their critically overvalued breakthrough with what can best be described as a lousy plop of Synclavier-esque orchestral noodlings — painfully reminiscent of Frank Zappa’s “serious music” in the last decade of his life. If only this track had befallen a similar fate: the “composition” comes on the unnamed track 12, but is backwards indexed two-and-a-half-minutes. At the conclusion of the back-indexed music, the track begins and lasts zero seconds, thus ending the record — so, if you skip ahead to 12, you’ll miss it entirely. Me, I skip ahead to 12.
Matthew Weiner


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