Backdrifts

a light, a smell

The promotional interview disc Parlophone sent to the British music press on 22 April 2003 had Thom Yorke putting the song in one line, as being about “the slide backwards that's happening everywhere you look”. That was the tidy version.

Asked by M-Web whether “Backdrifts” was a bleak picture of the world, he gave the untidy one. The words were ambivalent on purpose, he said, and the song came from a particular light he had seen and a particular smell. What he kept running into was panic, and the song ended up with a fluorescent light in it. Then he admitted that was probably not much help, and sighed.

Basically this pure blind panic which I kept encountering in different forms.

thom yorke · m-web, 2003

Jonny Greenwood, asked the same thing by M-Web, answered as an engineer. For him it was the song where they finally got all the boxes and machines talking to each other.

reversed sounds and old drum machines

Nick Collins, reviewing the band's last three albums for Computer Music Journal, picked this and “The Gloaming” as the two tracks most worth his readers' attention, with “Like Spinning Plates” from Amnesiac as the sketch for both. Under “Backdrifts” he found reversed, slow-attack sounds and resonant pulses over the rhythms of early commercial drum machines.

backdrifting

The full title is “Backdrifts. (Honeymoon Is Over.)”. The lyric keeps changing its verb, drifting, then sliding, then tracking backwards, and it is written mostly in the first person plural: a “we” admitting it is spoiled goods, and a “you” who has buried the evidence and wiped the tapes but is given away by footsteps. Kate Livett, writing in the Australian Humanities Review in 2007, counted those buried evidence and erased tapes among the stock phrases the whole album is saturated with, and read them as a way of saying what cannot quite be said.

dublin to melbourne

Unlike the rest of the album, bar “The Gloaming”, it was not tried out in Portugal and Spain in the summer of 2002. The two arrived together at the Olympia Theatre in Dublin on 17 May 2003. Four nights later, at the Corn Exchange in Edinburgh, Celtic were playing Porto in the UEFA Cup final in Seville, and when the song finished Ed O'Brien told the hall the score was 1-1.

It was played 45 times that year, came back at Intex Osaka on 14 April 2004 for the Japanese and Australian dates, and its last night so far is Melbourne on 26 April 2004.

missing, then found

When Yorke posted his own alternative running order for the album on Radiohead's website in 2008, “Backdrifts” was one of four songs he took out. In August 2025 Hail to the Thief (Live Recordings 2003–2009) dropped it again, with “A Punchup at a Wedding”, to fit the record on vinyl; Rob Sheffield noted the gap in Rolling Stone.

On 31 October 2025, the day the CD and vinyl came out, subscribers to the W.A.S.T.E. newsletter were sent a live “Backdrifts” as a free download. The note with it said the track had been missing from the live album and could now be considered found.