Knives Out

the simple one

It came out of the sessions that made Kid A and Amnesiac, and it is the odd one out, a guitar song on two records that had walked away from guitars. Thom Yorke told the Chicago Tribune it was no departure at all, and that it survived because it was too good to miss.

The band first recorded it in Copenhagen in March 1999, and Yorke later wanted more energy than that take had; Ed O'Brien thought it just floated along. In October they set it up as a five-piece and played it live, and it was not happening, so it went down to Yorke and Phil Selway alone. They banged out seven takes and Nigel Godrich edited the best bits together. The next day Colin Greenwood's bass and Jonny Greenwood's guitar went on top and did not work, somebody put the Copenhagen version back on, and Godrich loved its feel and still did not think it quite good enough.

When it was finally done, in March 2000, O'Brien counted some 373 days since the first take. He told a friend how long it had taken, and the friend assumed anything that slow must be “a kind of paranoid android to the power of ten”. O'Brien's own explanation in his diary was the opposite.

The song is probably the most straight ahead thing that we've done in years… and that might explain why we took so long on it.

ed o'brien · studio diary, 20 march 2000

Successful bands, he reckoned, lose the knack of simple songs, above all ones written on an acoustic guitar, because the urge to dress them up takes over.

round the christmas tree

The first anyone outside the studio heard of it was on 9 December 1999, at the end of the band's first webcast from radiohead.com, three hours or more of Jonny and Yorke playing records and dancing, and Phil Selway's sock-puppet show. They played it live and acoustic; in O'Brien's diary, “a last minute executive decision was made to play ‘knives out’ around the xmas tree”. By his count about 250 people were watching.

the smiths

At a rehearsal in September 1999 O'Brien noted that it sounded rather like the Smiths, with Selway getting Mike Joyce's drumming down exactly, and the guitars on the record point the same way. O'Brien played it to Johnny Marr before it came out.

He explained to me that with that song they'd tried to take a snapshot of the way I'd done things in the Smiths, and I guess you can hear that in it.

johnny marr, may 2003

cannibalism, more or less

On stage in 2000, before the record, Yorke introduced it as being about cannibalism. In interviews he added the businessman who walks out on his wife and children and never comes back, and the thousand-yard stare of looking at someone close and knowing they are going to die.

the single, and gondry's hospital

It was the second single from Amnesiac, after “Pyramid Song”, out on 6 August 2001 with three new songs spread across the two CDs, “Worrywort”, “Fog” and “Cuttooth”. It reached number 13 in Britain and number one in Canada. The Flaming Lips, Christopher O'Riley and Brad Mehldau have covered it since.

Michel Gondry made the video, Yorke grieving in a hospital room while the set is pulled apart and rebuilt around him. Gondry was going through a break-up and put it into the film, and then fell out with the band over exactly that. He had shown Yorke the storyboard down to every detail, he said later, and the criticism that he had been selfish came afterwards.

It did not go smoothly, but if it went smoothly, it would be mediocre.

michel gondry · the playlist, 26 june 2008

the night england won

It went on stage with the 2000 tour and stayed there through Amnesiac. Of its 55 nights, 27 came in 2001, and the latest was Saitama on 5 October 2008. At the homecoming in Oxford in July 2001 Jonny moved over to the upright piano for it.

On 17 June 2000 the band played the Arènes de Fréjus, a Roman arena on the French Riviera, on the evening England beat Germany 1–0 at Euro 2000 with an Alan Shearer goal, and just before “Knives Out” O'Brien told the crowd the score. Writing his diary in Milan the next day, he thought better of it. It had been, he wrote, a “bad move this was zidane country and very partisan to boot”, though the crowd were great all the same.