Main Index On a Friday 1985-1991 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
During the Kid A period, parts of the lyrics first appeared in a few pages in radiohead.com. This one was titled 'another':

let me tell you your fortune
dead by 32 pack up like sardine in crush tin box
after years of waiting nothing came and as your life flashed before your eyes you realize you were looking in the wrong place. bound on your knees


almst evryone wants too bee yoour friend! weed like to make a film of your life now yoour dead

who can we contact? who is executor of your estate?



Another page from the same period is very similar to the one above:





packt up like sardine in crush tin box
after years of waiting nothing came and as your life flashed before your eyes you realize you were looking in the wrong place.

now
almst evryone wants too bee yoour friend! weed like to make a film

of your life now yoour dead

who can we contact? who is executor of your estate?

Colin: "The 'kkkurrghh' from 'Packt Like Sardines', that's from Thom's laptop. We just compressed messed-up loops."
Like its predecessor, Amnesiac will be produced by Nigel Godrich, and is expected out in June. [...] And while a full track listing has not been confirmed, a song titled 'Po Pad' will be the album's first song. 'Pyramid Song (a.k.a. Egyptian Song)' and 'Living in a Glass House', two songs that the band had played earlier this year, will also be included on the album. The latter features a special guest appearance by British jazz writer and musician Humphrey Lyttleton.
Q: "OK. Um, is it fair to say that more of the tracks on Amnesiac are kind of based on a studio concept of, kind of, the band in a room together as opposed to each of you off on your own working on a piece of equipment?"

Colin: "I don't know. Um, uh, it's kind of a mixture again like the last record, really. There's live things on it. But our last, most live record was OK Computer where this record and Kid A has elements of live and studio but it was more studio-based as a record."

Q: "Uh-huh."

Colin: "I mean, like 'Dollars and Cents' is a live jam, but then that's a live jam that's been cut up. And 'You and Whose Army' was like basically was a whole live performance. But each song is different, like 'Packt like Sardines'. It's straight out of Thom's laptop, but we're playing it live, with like this distorted bass thing which is really exciting, because a reverse archeology is being practiced upon the music, which is really cool." [Laughter]
Another vocal treatment Yorke resorted to was the Autotuner, most famous from Cher's 'Believe', but widely used in contemporary R&B as an intermittent glister of posthuman perfect pitch added to particular lines or words. "We used Autotuner on Amnesiac twice. On 'Packt Like Sardines', I wasn't particularly out of tune, but if you really turn up the Autotuner so it's dead in pitch, it makes it go slightly..." he makes a nasal, depersonalised sound. "There's also this trick you can do, which we did on both 'Packt' and 'Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors', where you give the machine a key and then you just talk into it. It desperately tries to search for the music in your speech, and produces notes at random. If you've assigned it a key, you've got music."
On January 4th 2000, a page called'N I G H T F A L L I N G' was created. The title phrase can be found on this page:

.WAF


 

 

 

instructions for use:
1 printout.
2 cut into flashcards line by line and wave from the public gallery.
3 produce at random out of a hat.
4 wear headphones or mobile earpiece.

chancey gardner

chattering classes

roundup

trapped like rats

inexplicable

exocet

what have i done wrong?

a waking nightmare

carpal tunnel syndrome

most paper money has traces of cocaine

most paper money has traces of blood

compromise

there is nothing i can do to make you understand

look out the window what do you see?

lost in woods

not a single word

albatross

watch him skwirm cant decide

never

cliches fall from mouth like spit

possibly california

packt up like sardines in crushtin box

gotobed

shot in the head

stuck in the mud

lost in woods

look at him go

only window shopping.

nothing.

something.

everything.

something.

nothing.
The title phrase can also be found in the hidden Kid A booklet [click to enlarge]:
And in this poster:


This page from the Amnesiac artwork contains the title phrase:



Another page from the Amnesiac artwork also features the opening lines of the song:

In an early 2001 interview, Ed mentioned that the opening song for the new album would be a track called 'Po Pad', but when Thom announced the tracklist on the official messageboard at radiohead.com he said that 'Po Pad' had changed its name, but he didn't mention what to. However, there is no reason to doubt that 'Po Pad' was the working title of 'Packt Like Sardines In A Crushd Tin Box'.
This song was initially played live only on the 2001 Amnesiac tour, and during that period rather regularly. This is the live debut, recorded on april 28th 2001 for a TV special by Canal+ in Paris:
This recording comes from the 'Later... with Jools Holland' Radiohead special from june 9th 2001:
In 2006, this piece of artwork appeared in the Dead Children Playing book that accompanied the exhibition of artwork that Stanley held at Iguapop Gallery in Barcelona (click image for full size):

On March 15th 2012, the band played a brand new arrangement for the first time in Glendale, Arizona. It was the only live performance during the The King of Limbs tour, the song's 26th in total and its last to date:
The Kid A Mnesia Exhibition, released in 2021, contains numerous stems of the song.