The National Anthem

the riff

Thom Yorke wrote the riff when he was 16 and kept it for more than a decade. In late 1997 the band put down drums and bass for it, meaning it as a B-side for OK Computer, and then thought better of giving it away. That demo came out in 2017 on the OKNOTOK special edition, and Jamie Atkins in Record Collector reckoned it could easily have turned into the kind of latter-day U2 track that ends up under football highlights.

ondes martenot and radio static

They recorded it properly in Gloucestershire in mid-1999. Yorke played the bass himself and ran his vocal through a ring modulator, and Jonny Greenwood added ondes Martenot and sounds sampled off the radio as he scanned between stations.

It's a very ill-disciplined way of recording… You're adding things to the stew, as well as rejecting things, and then you come back to the song with fresh ears.

ed o'brien, january 2001

just blow

In November 1999 eight jazz brass players came in for a day, and the band asked them for free jazz. The model was Charles Mingus's Complete Town Hall Concert, the same record that shaped “Pyramid Song”.

Just fucking chaos… There's this incredible tension and it was the most formative record of the whole time.

thom yorke · juice, 1 october 2000

Yorke and Jonny asked the players for a traffic jam, angry people stuck in a lift. Yorke conducted by jumping up and down, and broke his foot doing it.

The running joke when we were in the studios was, ‘Just blow. Just blow, just blow, just blow.’

thom yorke · mtv, 1 october 2001

the radio on stage

It was first played in Arles on 13 June 2000, months before Kid A came out, and it has opened 50 shows since. Horn players came with it when they could, seven of them beside the band at Roseland in New York that October.

The radio stayed for good. At Shepherd's Bush in May 2003 Jonny started the song by tuning an old transistor radio, and the crowd cheered as soon as he picked it up. At Madison Square Garden in July 2016 the song carried a radio presenter talking about Hillary Clinton.

the horns on the record

Nick Hornby, reviewing Kid A for the New Yorker, called it an unpleasant free-jazz workout and blamed the horns, which is a fair description and the wrong conclusion. Simon Reynolds, in Spin, liked it a great deal more.

Yorke heard the same doubt closer to home. A fan told him he could not make sense of the horns, and Yorke concluded that people did not want a sound that angry on a record they had paid for.