For a long time considered one of Radiohead’s “lost classics,” (akin to “Lift” and “True Love Waits”), this song first emerged in setlists supporting The Bends in 1995.

It was called “Big Boots” by fans, who could only hear it through the few low quality live recordings from that era, until the band recorded it at Abbey Road Studios in March 1998, intended as a song for the soundtrack to the 1998 film The Avengers (unrelated to the Marvel Comics superhero team).

These recordings, which the band were unsatisfied with, are featured in a distressing sequence in the 1998 documentary film Meeting People is Easy, which follows Radiohead on their exhaustive tour in support of OK Computer. The lyrics to the song were printed on the back of the movie’s DVD packaging. The song was later played live only once in Salamanca, Spain in 2002.

In 2017, fifteen years after it was last played live, Radiohead announced that “Man of War” would be one of the unreleased songs to be packaged with OK Computer’s 20th anniversary reissue titled OK Comptuer OKNOTOK 1997 2017. Ending with hardcore fans long waiting, the song debuted on the BBC one day prior to the release of OKNOTOK on June 22. On the same day, a music video directed by Colin Read was released for it, which is much akin to the paranoia of OK Computer and The Bends-era videos, such as that of “Karma Police” and “Just”.