4 Minute Warning

four minutes

The four-minute warning was Britain's public alert for an incoming nuclear attack, named for the time people would have before it landed. The phrase had been in the band's world since 1997, in the artwork Thom Yorke made with Stanley Donwood around the “Karma Police” single.

the neil young song

Ed O'Brien's online diary has the song in July 1999, during the Kid A sessions, and there it is a rehearsal-room joke. The band were trying three-part harmonies on something they called “neil young *9”, and Phil Selway was laughing too hard to finish because he felt like the drummer from the Eagles. Six months later it had a name.

did an interesting band version of bombers which thom has attached to what i used to call the neil young song… we may play it some time later this evening.

ed o'brien · online diary, 10–19 january 2000

It was not played live until 2006. The joined song went by “Bombers”, and in 2003 this site's page for it had no recording and no words on it.

round the piano

It was one of eight new songs on the first night of the 2006 tour, in Copenhagen on 6 May, with Yorke at the piano and O'Brien on acoustic guitar. In Chicago that June, Curt Baran of the Illinois Entertainer watched the band crowd round Yorke's upright piano like a group in a rehearsal room, and in Toronto it opened the second encore. It was played on eleven nights of that tour, from Copenhagen to San Diego.

the end of the second disc

It closes the second disc of In Rainbows, out in December 2007, a droning ambient introduction and then a slow song about running from bombers, sung almost calmly. Yorke liked its plainness, and Ernest Simpson, reviewing the disc for Treble, picked it as the best thing on it.

In November 2022 Mike Hadreas, who records as Perfume Genius, put it on the session he made for Spotify's Live at Electric Lady series, the one song there that was not his own. He had spent the lockdowns sitting at the piano in his room, singing it over and over.