2 + 2 = 5

a test of the room

The first sound on Hail to the Thief is Jonny Greenwood plugging his guitar into his amplifier, and Thom Yorke saying “that's a nice way to start, Jonny”, and it was left there on purpose. The band had gone into Ocean Way in Hollywood with Nigel Godrich and cut the song to hear how the room sounded. It took two hours.

It starts small, on a sequenced drum pattern and a guitar arpeggio in seven. The pops that ring over it are Ed O'Brien picking above the fretboard, with Greenwood in drop D underneath, and then the second half comes in with everything at once and the line “you have not been paying attention”. Halfway through the sessions Phil Selway and O'Brien chose the running order, and they put this first.

orwell, and dante

The main title is the slogan from Nineteen Eighty-Four, two and two making five because the Party says so, believed as proof of obedience. The second title, “(The Lukewarm.)”, comes from Dante, whose lukewarm souls did nothing wrong and nothing about anyone else's wrong either. “Hail to the thief”, a line in this song and the name the album took, was chanted at George W. Bush after the 2000 election, a twist on “Hail to the Chief”.

the single

It was the third and last single from the album, out on 17 November 2003, and reached number two in Canada and 15 in Britain. The B-sides gathered the year's loose ends: a demo of “There There”, Cristian Vogel's remix of “Myxomatosis”, Four Tet's of “Scatterbrain” and an alternative “I Will” from Ocean Way. The live version recorded at Earls Court went onto the Com Lag EP in 2004 and again onto Hail to the Thief (Live Recordings 2003–2009) in 2025.

the screens go up

It was first heard in San Sebastián on 31 July 2002, on the run through Spain and Portugal where most of the album was tried in public, and from 2003 it was often the second song of the night, straight after “There There”. It took the first slot itself only from Mansfield on 13 August 2003, and has opened twenty-seven shows in all.

The 2025 tour gave it back the top of the set. At the Movistar Arena in Madrid on 5 November it opened a Radiohead show for the first time since 2004, and from then on the band took turns between a set that began with it and one that began with “Planet Telex”. In London that month they played in the round, inside a cylinder of tall screens, and the screens rose at the moment the song breaks open.