A Wolf at the Door

needs thom's rant

Ed O'Brien's online diary has the band trying it on 8 December 1999, during the Kid A sessions, under a longer name, at the end of what he called a fragmented day.

it's too late and needs thom's rant on it.

ed o'brien · online diary, 8 december 1999

The 2003 version of this site kept a page for it under that name, “Keep The Wolf From The Door”, with nothing on it but the diary line.

lisbon, night two

It was first played on 23 July 2002, the second of three nights at the Coliseu dos Recreios in Lisbon. NME reported it that week as “Keep The Wolf From The Door” and a few days later as “Wolf From The Door”, and Johnny Davis singled out O'Brien's guitar line. The 2003 site had heard it might also be called “Stepford Wives”.

the music and the words

Chuck Klosterman, who spent eight hours with the band in an Oxford hotel for Spin in 2003, was told that Jonny Greenwood wrote all of the music and Thom Yorke only added the words. The words came from a train. Yorke found himself in a carriage with a party of unruly men, and what he wrote is his side of the trip: nursery-rhyme threats, a ransom call, and a man at the end of his patience asking to be taken away. The chorus, about keeping the wolf from the door, is sung, and the rest he half-sings, half-talks at speed. John Robinson, reviewing it in NME, found a pretty song with a sinister monologue in it, and the pretty part is all Greenwood's. The full title adds “(It Girl. Rag Doll.)”.

a glass of water

It is the 14th and last track, put there, Yorke said, to wake the listener at the end, as if the whole record had been a nightmare and it was time to go and get a glass of water. It closes Hail to the Thief (Live Recordings 2003–2009) in the same way, 22 years later.

On 23 September 2014 Yorke posted the song's words on Twitter with new lines added that had never been in it. NME took that, with a white label he had put up the day before, as a sign that the band were back at work.

edinburgh to madrid

It came into the 2003 tour in the first encore at the Corn Exchange in Edinburgh on 21 May, and it has never opened or closed a show, though at the Schottenstein Center in Columbus on 23 July 2018 it opened the second encore. After the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia on 31 July that year it was away 2,653 days, until the Movistar Arena in Madrid on 4 November 2025, where it was 16th in the set on Radiohead's first night on stage in seven years.

stipe's teeth

Michael Stipe, an old friend of the band's, told the German magazine Galore that when he first heard it he ground his teeth and decided he could do better.