No Surprises

oslo, a dressing room

Thom Yorke wrote it on tour with R.E.M. in 1995 and played it to both bands in a dressing room in Oslo on 3 August, as a sketch called “No Surprises Please”. The words were different then, and one early line had a girl who does not take off her dress when she bleeds in the bathtub. The glockenspiel came later, and so did the rewrite.

pet sounds, slowed down

Yorke wanted the Pet Sounds feeling, a childlike guitar sound that he said set the mood for the whole of OK Computer, somewhere near Marvin Gaye or “What a Wonderful World”. The electric guitar figure takes after “Wouldn't It Be Nice”.

By July 1996 Nigel Godrich had a mobile studio running in Canned Applause, the converted apple shed the band rehearsed in, and Colin Greenwood, writing the history of the sessions for Capitol's press kit, has this as the first take on the first day. They recorded many more versions and could not beat it, so the first one is the record. The tempo they wanted was slower than they could play cleanly, so Godrich had them record faster and slowed the tape down for Yorke to sing over, which is where the floating quality comes from. Colin called it the band's stadium-friendly song.

If you play it right, it is fucking dark. But it's like acting. It's on the edge of totally hamming it up but you're not… It only sounds good if it's really fragile.

thom yorke · q, august 2016

a heart like a landfill

Yorke called it a “fucked-up nursery rhyme”, about someone trying hard to keep it together and failing. Sam Steele, in Vox, heard the guitar as balm and the song as a child's prayer, though its subject is suicide. Ed O'Brien heard sympathy in it, for the nine-to-fivers stuck on the treadmill, yuppies included, where in the late 1980s the band had simply been angry about yuppie values.

The first image is rubbish that will not rot.

All this stuff is getting buried, the debris of our lives. It doesn't rot, it just stays there. That's how we deal, that's how I deal with stuff, I bury it.

thom yorke · yahoo! launch, 17 august 1997

the helmet

Parlophone had meant to film a video for every track on the album. Grant Gee pitched for this one and “Fitter Happier”; his first idea here, which he later called “some kind of sparkly music-box themed performance-based nonsense”, was turned down, and the whole plan collapsed when the “Paranoid Android” and “Karma Police” videos went over budget.

Six months later, by then filming the band for Meeting People Is Easy, Gee was asked to try again. He listened to the song while looking at a still of the astronaut Bowman in 2001: A Space Odyssey and wondered whether a video could be nothing but a close-up of a man in a helmet. Childhood memories of underwater escape acts and the liquid-filled helmets in UFO went in too. He fixed on the line about a job that slowly kills you, and decided the film should run in real time and feel like “murderous seconds”.

A special effects company built a perspex helmet that could be slowly flooded, and dumped by Yorke in an emergency. To shorten the time under water they sped the song up, doubled the camera from 25 to 50 frames a second, and slowed both again once the water drained, so the vocal stays in sync. Yorke could hold his breath calmly for over a minute; on the day he struggled past ten seconds.

The day turned into a horror show… [It was] repeated torture.

grant gee · the quietus, 15 january 2018

The frustration is on film in Meeting People Is Easy. After many attempts, coached through it by the assistant director, Yorke got one take, with the lyrics scrolling up in the reflection, the water rising, a minute of stillness, then the flood released and the singing starting again.

the third single

It was the third and last British single from OK Computer, after “Paranoid Android” and “Karma Police”, and reached number four. American modern rock radio got it on 27 April 1998. An early version with the older lyrics came out on OKNOTOK in 2017, and more turned up in the 2019 minidisc leak, where it starts life as a brisk Bends-style ballad with a long guitar outro before it became the lullaby. By March 2025 it was Radiohead's most streamed song after “Creep”, past a billion plays. Amanda Palmer has done it on ukulele, and Roman GianArthur turned it into R&B in 2015.

for the people playing pool

It reached a stage in Amsterdam on 4 December 1995, a year and a half before the album, and it was played 71 times in 1997. One of those was a private show in Vancouver on 31 July for fewer than a thousand people, 300 of them staff from EMD, EMI's American distributor, and the rest contest winners, and Yorke dedicated it “for the people playing pool”.

It sat out 2010 to 2015 completely, and its longest silence ran seven years, from Philadelphia on 31 July 2018 to Madrid on 4 November 2025.

bring down the government

The bridge has the only political line in the song, and it keeps getting used. In 2001 Yorke dedicated it to George W. Bush at the bullring in Bilbao and to Tony Blair at the homecoming show in South Park, Oxford. On the 2003 tour he noticed American crowds coming alive at “bring down the government / they don't speak for us”.

Regina Spektor played it at a Doctors Without Borders benefit at Irving Plaza in New York in March 2010, arranged for piano and voice, and on 27 April put that version on iTunes, with all the money going to earthquake relief in Haiti and Chile. On 24 May 2019, the day Theresa May said she would resign, the British website JOE cut her speech to it. When Liz Truss resigned on 20 October 2022, after 45 days, Yorke paraphrased it himself.

bring down this UK government, they do not speak for us, right the fuck now

thom yorke · twitter, 20 october 2022