Radiohead's “If You Say the Word” video rounds up office workers like livestock

Radiohead have released a video for “If You Say the Word”, the song from the Kid A and Amnesiac sessions that nobody had heard until it came out with the announcement of KID A MNESIA on 7 September. In it, men and women in dark business suits are hunted through woods and open fields like wild animals. A small group of men catch them, load them into a livestock trailer and feed them small wedges of sandwich, then drive them into central London, hand each one a briefcase and send them back to work.

The director is Kasper Häggström, a Norwegian signed to the production company Object & Animal. He told LBB Online that the song is melancholy, so he wanted something unexpected. I wanted to make a parallel universe where we take an absurd idea very seriously.¹¹ The captives never react; they stare plainly into the distance. He likes ideas, he says, in which people are unaffected by abnormal events.

He shot it in two days, sunrise to sunset, on 35mm film with natural light only. I think we all felt the weight of the band's legacy, making everyone a bit more focused.¹¹ Because the song is 20 years old he wanted the film to look neutral and tied to no particular year, the style his colourist, Julien Alary, calls the Ken Loach approach. They stopped short, Häggström says, of going fully Loach.