Song · In Rainbows era (2007–09)
15 Step
Yorke built the beat on a laptop in five, and a room of cheering children opened it up.
In Rainbowsalbum- 2007released
- 3:57length
2005
the mad rhythm experiment
It came out of a stretch in 2005 when the band were deliberately working in odd metres. Yorke assembled the beat on his laptop, taking the clapping groove of Peaches' “Fuck the Pain Away” as the model, and what came out sits in five.
They teased it on their blog in March 2006, played it for the first time in Copenhagen that May, and played it on thirty nights that year.
the sound
forty seconds of mulch, then a guitar
It opens with about forty seconds of chopped-up drum machine, closer to Kid A than to anything on this record, before the guitar and a bassline arrive and reveal that the song is in the Dorian mode, which it abandons for natural minor at 1:38.
The words are about deception and disillusion, and the line “fifteen steps, then a sheer drop” is a gallows. What undercuts all of that is the sound of children cheering, recorded by Godrich and Colin Greenwood at the Matrix Arts Centre in Oxfordshire.
The result is the happiest-sounding thing the band have made. The BBC called it “astoundingly uplifting”, and a data analysis in 2017 declared it, formally, the happiest Radiohead song.
2008
the video, crowdsourced
In March 2008 the band's American label ran a contest with Aniboom: submit a storyboard for a song from In Rainbows and get it made. Hideyuki Kota's storyboard for this one was among four winners, and the finished animation went up on 2 December 2008.
8 feb 2009
the grammys
They played it at the 2009 Grammys with thirty-six members of the USC Trojan Marching Band behind them. Entertainment Weekly said it took “an already good song and turn[ed] it into a jubilant, slightly menacing masterpiece”, and it now turns up routinely on lists of the best Grammy performances ever.
2006–2025
the way in
Of the archive's 192 nights, forty have opened with it.
the video
The official promo, from Scotch Mist.· Radioheadwatch on youtube →
takes(2)
explained
The 5/4 drum pattern rebuilt from scratch on a drum machine.· Captain Pikantwatch on youtube →
Live history
| Times played | 192 shows |
|---|---|
| Live debut | Saturday 6 May 2006 · Copenhagen |
| Last played | Monday 15 December 2025 · Copenhagen |
| Opened the night | 40 times |
| Longest absence | 7 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 →
sources9
- Tom Doyle, “The Complete Radiohead”, Q, April 2008.
- Nick Kent, “Ghost in the Machine”, 1 August 2006.
- Scott Plagenhoef, “Pitchfork's guide to Radiohead's In Rainbows”, Pitchfork, 9 October 2007.
- Mark Pytlik, “Radiohead: In Rainbows”, Pitchfork, 15 October 2007.
- Victoria Malawey, Ear Training with the Music of Radiohead, Indiana University Press, 2012.
- Alexis Petridis, The Guardian, 10 October 2007.
- Daniel Kreps, “Radiohead picks four winners for animation contest”, Rolling Stone, 11 August 2008.
- Whitney Pastorek, Entertainment Weekly, 7 February 2009.
- Aja Romano, “Radiohead and sadness: a data analysis”, Vox, 2 March 2017.