Song · Hail to the Thief era (2003–04)
Sit Down. Stand Up
Radiohead left it out of their sets for 21 years, from Coachella in 2004 to Madrid in 2025.
Hail to the Thiefalbum- 2003released
- 4:19length
1998
rwanda on the television
It is older than the album around it. Going through Hail to the Thief track by track for NME in May 2003, Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood said this one was written about five years earlier, in the stretch after OK Computer, while Yorke was watching coverage of Rwanda on television. “I Will” comes from the same months.
A calm, drilled voice gives orders to sit and to stand, walks people towards hell and reminds them it can wipe them out whenever it likes. It is one of the songs on the record that use Christian ideas of heaven and hell, which Radiohead had not done before. The full title adds “(Snakes & Ladders.)”, which was on the list of possible names for the album itself, alongside the subtitles that went to “Go to Sleep” and “There There”.
jul 2002
the lisbon debut
The band first played it on 23 July 2002, the second of their three nights at the Coliseu dos Recreios in Lisbon. NME's Johnny Davis heard a keyboard figure, samples from Greenwood and drums that kept speeding up. It went down so well that Yorke ruled it out of the next few sets. The ban did not hold, and it was played on 10 nights that summer.
2002–03
mingus
Most of the album was cut in about two and a half weeks in Los Angeles with Nigel Godrich, often a song a day. On the interview CD sent to the press in April 2003 the band called this an electronic song with Charles Mingus behind it. CBS's CSI used an extract of it in an episode at the start of May 2003, a month before the album was out.
2003–25
mansfield, then madrid
At the Tweeter Center in Mansfield on 13 August 2003, the first night of the band's August tour of North America, it came second, stripped back, after “2 + 2 = 5”. Sixty-two nights came that year, and it opened the night once.
After the Coachella night at Indio on 1 May 2004 it was not played again for 7,857 days. It came back as the third song at the Movistar Arena in Madrid on 4 November 2025, Radiohead's first show in seven years, and the next night a snatch of it turned up in the introduction to “Everything in Its Right Place”. It stayed in the set for 18 nights that winter.
By then it had a second life on stage. Hamlet Hail to the Thief, the RSC and Factory International staging Yorke made with Christine Jones and Steven Hoggett, opens on it, with strobes, blades and falling bodies in Daniel Dylan Wray's account for Pitchfork. A live take is track two of Hail to the Thief (Live Recordings 2003–2009), released by XL on 13 August 2025.
the raindrops
46, or 47
It ends on a single phrase, “the rain drops”, sung again and again over a beat that keeps climbing. Chuck Klosterman counted 46 of them, and put them down to the same reason as the title “Myxomatosis”, that Yorke liked the way it sounded on tape. The lyric sheet the 2003 version of this site kept makes it 47.
the video
The official promo film.· Radioheadwatch on youtube →
the record(1)
on stage(5)
Live history
| Times played | 98 shows |
|---|---|
| Live debut | Tuesday 23 July 2002 · Lisbon |
| Last played | Tuesday 16 December 2025 · Copenhagen |
| Longest absence | 21 years · back on Tuesday 4 November 2025 · Madrid |
Nights played include broadcasts; opened and closed count gigs only. A cancelled night has no setlist. All setlist stats →
sources11
- Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood, track-by-track guide to Hail to the Thief, NME, 10 May 2003, for the date of writing and Rwanda.
- Wikipedia, “Hail to the Thief”, for the heaven-and-hell theme (citing Tate, p. 182), the album-title candidates (citing Michael Odell, Q, July 2003, and Xfm London, 2 July 2003) and the Mingus influence (citing the Parlophone interview CD, 22 April 2003).
- Johnny Davis, feature on the Lisbon shows, NME, 3 August 2002, for the premiere and Yorke's reaction.
- Chuck Klosterman, “No More Knives”, Spin, July 2003 (republished 11 March 2023), for the recording pace and the 46 raindrops.
- The 2003 lyrics page for the song, as preserved on this site.
- The site's own 2003 desk, for CSI.
- Shawn Fitzgerald, “Radiohead @ Tweeter Center, Mansfield”, musicOMH, 13 August 2003.
- Wikipedia, “2025 Radiohead tour”, for the Madrid running order.
- The site's news story on the second Madrid night, 5 November 2025, drawing on Rolling Stone and Stereogum, for the snatch in “Everything in Its Right Place”.
- Daniel Dylan Wray, review of Hamlet Hail to the Thief, Pitchfork, 8 May 2025.
- Wikipedia, “Hail to the Thief (Live Recordings 2003–2009)”, for the live album.