Main Index Pablo Honey The Bends OK Computer Kid A Amnesiac Hail to the Thief In Rainbows The King of Limbs A Moon Shaped Pool Thom Yorke Jonny Greenwood Ed O'Brien Colin Greenwood Philip Selway
A piece from the Amnesiac artwork contains the "release me please" line at the bottom of the page:

Though it was released later than the Kid A version, the recording that was released on Amnesiac as 'Morning Bell/Amnesiac' was actually recorded before the Kid A version. The band rediscovered the version, that was originally considered to be not good enough, and liked the completely different feeling of it compared to the Kid A version. These are the slightly differently structured lyrics of the Amnesiac version:
the morning bell
light another candle and
release me

you can keep the furniture
a bump on the head
howling down the chimney
release me

where'd you park the car
the clothes are on the lawn with the furniture

and I might as well
sleepy jack the fire drill
round and round and round

cut the kids in half
release me
Ed's Diary mentions 'Morning Bell' in a few entries. Judging from this source it seems like the Amnesiac version stems from the Batsford sessions, and the one on Kid A from the sessions in Copenhagen:
Undated (mid-november 1999), posted on december 1st 1999
-i've tried to write something about what we've been doing in the last five weeks - there have been the day-by-day accounts which have been of the 'we did this and then we did that' variety..........all incredibly boring to read. then there have been a couple of 'essays' written whilst stoned late at night, only to be re-read the next morning. pretensious old tosh. all have been discarded. it's easy to get extremely self-conscious doing this. we're in london at present and nigel is mixing; he has been for three days. which means that we have actually finished six or so tracks. this has been our life for the last five weeks - we had a list of about ten songs which was then further narrowed down to six. they are definitely different....................there's an eight piece brass ensemble in a charles mingus style on one - eight 'jazzers' came down for the day and blew their stuff all over 'everyone - the national anthem'. they were fantastic............thom and jonny conducted. what a day. there's 'optimistic', there's another which started off as a thom doodle on the 505........there's also the paris version of 'lost at sea'.........the batsford 'morning bell'.it is different. but that's what we do. what has also become evident is that the summer panic that led to two months rehearsal may have been a little premature.....or at the very least a little on the hysterical side.there was some good stuff recorded in paris, copenhagen and batsford. i've been listening to alot of the copenhagen tracks and out-takes and the overall sound is great. pretty dark but then that session was hardly a chuckle-trousered affair.
wednesday, march 1st 2000
thom and nige arrange some drums on 'morning bell' ...........downstairs we continue trying to get rhythm stuff on 'i will'. arranging it on the computer....taking a while to do, but these things do.....
monday, march 6th 2000
we spent alot of time last week 'throwing shit' (jonny specifically said he was sick of hearing these very words today) at 'i will'. minor panics all round about completing things.....our perennial fear/problem....'morning bell-copenhagen', nigel did some very nice pro-tooling on some complete gibberish that i played. phil did some drums downstairs on the track that has no name.
At the end of the live versions Thom would sing lyrics that were included in none of the two studio versions:
I wanted to tell you but you never listen
I keep walking
and I wanted to tell you but you never listen
and I keep walkin', walkin', walkin'...

the lights are on but nobody's home
and everyone wants to be your friend
and nobody wants to be afraid
and everyone wants to be your friend
I keep walking, walking, walking
The performance from july 7th 2001 in Oxford was released on I Might Be Wrong - Live Recordings. This version is coupled here with low quality footage from the gig, which was seen on the big screens next to the stage:
The Kid A Mnesia reissue of both Kid A and Amnesiac contains another version of this track called 'The Morning Bell (In the Dark version)'. This follows from the Amnesiac version, but loops on the chords for 'cut the kids in half', resulting in a rather eerie coda if it were appended to the album version.
Thom: "It's very, very violent. Extremely violent. The really weird thing about that was I wrote the song with all the words pretty much straight away, which is basically the only one I did that with. I recorded it onto MiniDisc and then there was a lightning storm, and it wiped the MiniDisc and I lost the song. I completely forgot it. Then five months later, I was on a plane, knackered for 24 hours, I was just falling asleep, and I remembered it. It was really weird, I never had that before. It's gone in and took a long time to come out again. The lyrics are really... they're not as dramatic as they sound, you know? Except 'cut the kids in half', which is dramatic no matter which way you read it."
Q: "Is 'Morning Bell' about a breakup or a divorce?"

Thom: "Not really, no. That [one's] actually quite weird. When we came off of OK Computer, I bought this house, this empty house, and it had a ghost in it."

Q: "What sort of ghost?"

Thom: "Well, quite friendly, but a ghost."

Q: "How did you know it was there?"

Thom: "You just knew. You didn't say it, but you knew. So I filled up a whole MiniDisc of stuff, of songs and half-formed ramblings or whatever. Then there was a lightning strike and it wiped it all [out]. I was really upset, 'cause there was some really good stuff on it. But that was the general vibe of the house at the time, so I didn't think any of it. Then I forgot it, and six months later, I was in an airplane coming back from Japan or something and I didn't sleep at all. I hadn't slept for ages and ages. Suddenly, I was lying there, and I'd forgotten all the stuff from the MiniDisc, and 'Morning Bell' just came back to me, exactly as I had written it, with all the words and everything. It sounds like it's about a breakup, but it's really not. It's about being in this house. So there you go. You know, things are never that direct with me, unfortunately."
[Asked why another version of 'Morning Bell' was included on Amnesiac]

Thom: "because it came from such a different place from the other version. because we only found it again by accident after having forgotten about it. because it sounds like a recurring dream. it felt right."
Q: "It was your personal quest not to repeat OK Computer?"

Thom: "I don't think it was just me - it was everybody, really. What was happening was everyone was saying, 'Well, we've got to start somewhere..' But I was standing, going 'Yeah, but not here'. Then they'd say, 'So where, then?' And I'd reply, 'I don't know'. And the dialogue would just go round and round in circles like that. So we'd launch ideas off and about halfway through them I'd suddenly start screaming, 'This is bollocks! Stop the tape.' And I'd pull the tape off and start something else. Things seemed to be constantly faIling apart at that point. Then we'd go back and listen to them a few months later and suddenly we'd realise, 'That's fucking amazing, why the hell did we stop working on that.' That happened with loads of stuff like 'Morning Bell' and 'Spinning Plates'. Basically we'd lost all confidence in what we were trying to do; we didn't have the ability to see anything through. But gradually, as things got back to normal agoin, it became clear what was good and what wasn't."
Q: "One of the songs on Amnesiac is a fresh version of 'Morning Bell', which first appeared on Kid A, why the repetition?"

Ed: "Because we literally forgot about it. We often record different versions of songs and the new one is the first time it has been strong enough to bear hearing again. Most of the other versions often get scrapped halfway through. We're saving them for our box set in 20 years when no-one's interested in us anymore."
Thom: "It's not about being a guitarist in a rock band, it's about having an instrument in front of you and you're really excited by it. It's like with Jonny playing Ondes Martenot on... just about everything! We couldn't stop him! We had to beg him to play guitar on 'Morning Bell'."
  Amnesiac tour may 2001 june 2001 07/'01 august 2001 september 2001 10/2001
Optimistic [10] 01 05 07 08 17 20 09 14 29 04
In Limbo [12] 26 28 30 01 02 04 24 27 29 30 02 03
Morning Bell [34] 26 28 30 01 02 04 09 18 20 23 24 27 29 30 07 30 01 03 05 07 08 14 16 17 20 08 09 11 14 29 30 02 03 04
Motion Picture Soundtrack [4] 23 27 29 07
  2002 Iberian tour july 2002 august 2002
In Limbo [4] 26 27 31 06
Morning Bell [11] 22 23 24 26 27 30 31 01 03 05 06
The only solo performance ever comes from the Bridgeschool Benefit Concert on october 27th 2002:
  Hail to the Thief tour (1st half) may 2003 june 2003 july 2003 august 2003
Kid A [22] 18 19 22 24 25 05 07 13 26 04 08 11 12 14 03 13 15 18 21 23 26 30
In Limbo [1] 07
Morning Bell [17] 18 22 24 05 13 20 22 26 04 05 09 12 16 03 13 21 28
  Hail to the Thief tour (2nd half) sept. 2003 october 2003 november 2003 dec. 2003 april/may 2004
Kid A [17] 23 26 28 02 09 15 10 11 23 24 26 29 30 04 15 18 23
In Limbo [3] 06 10 13
Morning Bell [14] 23 26 01 04 06 09 10 15 23 29 04 15 18 23
  2006 pre-In Rainbows tour may 2006 june 2006 august 2006
Kid A [14] 01 02 04 05 08 10 13 14 17 20 24 26 29 15
Morning Bell [18] 07 13 16 18 05 07 10 13 19 23 26 29 15 20 22 24 26 28
  In Rainbows tour (1st half) may 2008 june 2008 july 2008
Kid A [1] 14
Optimistic [19] 05 06 08 09 11 14 17 18 06 07 10 12 15 17 20 25 27 29 05
Morning Bell [4] 05 09 17 09
  In Rainbows tour (2nd half) august 2008 october 2008 march 2009 august 2009
Kid A [7] 09 13 07 08 16 24 21
Optimistic [18] 01 06 08 13 15 19 20 25 27 28 01 02 05 08 15 22 26 25
In Limbo [2] 20 08
Morning Bell [13] 03 04 06 08 12 15 19 24 28 02 27 23 29
During the The King of Limbs period the song was not part of the regular touring and had its sole live performance at the Haiti benefit gig:
154. january 24th 2010 The Music Box Theatre at The Fonda Los Angeles, CA USA Link
  2017 A Moon Shaped Pool tour march/april 2017 june 2017 july 2017
Morning Bell [2] 30 08