Song · Hail to the Thief era (2003–04)
Go to Sleep
By the end of it, software set to chop the guitar up at random has taken the song over.
Hail to the Thiefalbum- 2003released
- 3:21length
2002
little man being erased
The full title is “Go to Sleep. (Little Man Being Erased.)”, and for a while the subtitle was a candidate for the whole album, alongside The Boney King of Nowhere and Snakes and Ladders. None of them won, and all three ended up as second titles for songs, in the manner of the Victorian music-hall playbills that had given the band the idea. Of all the album's second titles, Thom Yorke told Andrew Mueller in July 2003, this was his favourite.
It starts as an acoustic guitar riff that Colin Greenwood compared to English folk music of the 1960s. The metre will not sit still. The first part alternates bars of 4/4 and 12/8, so the strum keeps flipping between counting in twos and in threes. Brad Osborn used it as an example in a 2010 paper on grooves in math rock.
The words have been read as Gulliver's Travels: something tiptoes in and ties down the sleeper's arms, the way the Lilliputians pinned Gulliver while he slept. They end on a refusal, the singer who meant to sleep through it all deciding he will not.
2002–03
the stutter
The sound that jumps across the song, and takes over at the end, is Jonny Greenwood's guitar run through Max, the programming language he had been using to manipulate the band's playing, set to cut the signal up at random. The album credits him with guitar, laptop and toy piano on it.
Guitarists have chased it since. In February 2017 the founder of a Radiohead gear site put a pedal called the Feral Glitch on Kickstarter at $260, with random and fixed stutter modes, so that a guitarist could get near the patch without a laptop.
18 aug 2003
the single
It came out on 18 August 2003 as the second single from Hail to the Thief, on two CDs and a 12-inch. The B-sides were “I Am Citizen Insane”, a live “Fog (Again)”, “Gagging Order” and “I Am a Wicked Child”. Capitol put out the American CD on 3 September.
It reached number 12 in Britain and number two in Canada. Twenty years later Angie Martoccio of Rolling Stone doubted it had ever made sense as a single, and put the choice down to EMI wanting Radiohead back as a big rock band.
2003
the video
Alex Rutterford, who had made the video for Autechre's “Gantz Graf” the year before, directed it entirely in CGI. Yorke sits in a park while people in business suits hurry past him, and the classical buildings around the square fall to pieces and put themselves back together as modern blocks.
2002–2012
a spare guitar, then eight years away
The 2003 version of this site recorded its first performance at the Coliseu dos Recreios in Lisbon on 23 July 2002, and in 2003 it was in the set 64 times. On the first night of that tour, at the Olympia in Dublin on 17 May, Yorke's guitar gave out just before it and he played it on a replacement, and a fan in the hall reported that Jonny's playing on it amazed even the rest of the band.
A live recording from Osaka, remixed by Jonny, went on sale through warchildmusic.com on 9 September 2004 as a 99p download for War Child. Another live take is on Hail to the Thief (Live Recordings 2003–2009) in 2025, where Molly Mary O'Brien of Pitchfork heard it speed up and end in a glitching solo from Jonny.
After Rod Laver Arena in Melbourne on 26 April 2004 it went missing for 2,958 days. It came back for two American nights in June 2012, Newark on the 1st and Washington on the 3rd, which brings it to 75.
the video
The promo, directed by Alex Rutterford.· Radioheadwatch on youtube →
the record(1)
on stage(7)
Live history
| Times played | 75 shows |
|---|---|
| Live debut | Tuesday 23 July 2002 · Lisbon |
| Last played | Sunday 3 June 2012 · Washington |
| Longest absence | 8 years · back on Friday 1 June 2012 · Newark |
Nights played include broadcasts; opened and closed count gigs only. A cancelled night has no setlist. All setlist stats →
sources11
- Wikipedia, “Go to Sleep”, for the metre (citing Brad Osborn, “Beats that Commute: Algebraic and Kinesthetic Models for Math-Rock Grooves”, Gamut 3, 2010), the video, the track listings and chart placings.
- Wikipedia, “Hail to the Thief”, for the alternative titles (citing Michael Odell, Q, July 2003, and Xfm, 2 July 2003), Colin Greenwood's folk comparison (citing the Parlophone interview CD, 22 April 2003), Max, the Gulliver's Travels reading (citing Brandon W. Forbes, Radiohead and Philosophy, Open Court, 2009) and the album credits.
- Michael Astley-Brown, “Recreate Jonny Greenwood's randomised stutter effect with new Feral Glitch pedal”, MusicRadar, 22 February 2017.
- “New Releases: Singles”, Music Week, 16 August 2003, for the release date.
- Angie Martoccio, “Twenty years later, Radiohead's Hail to the Thief has never sounded better”, Rolling Stone, 9 June 2023.
- Wikipedia, “Alex Rutterford”, for “Gantz Graf”.
- “Radiohead release new song for War Child”, Music-News.com, for the Osaka download.
- Molly Mary O'Brien, review of Hail to the Thief (Live Recordings 2003–2009), Pitchfork, 15 August 2025.
- A fan report from the Olympia Theatre, Dublin, 17 May 2003, as carried by the site's news story on the night, for the spare guitar.
- Andrew Mueller, “Radiohead by Andrew Mueller. On The Road With The Mercury Prize Nominees”, The Quietus, 23 July 2008, for Yorke's favourite second title.
- The 2003 site's lyric page for the premiere, and the site's live archive for every date and count.