A Punchup at a Wedding

south park, oxford

On 7 July 2001 Radiohead played South Park in Oxford, their first hometown show since 1996, with Lyttelton, Beck, Sigur Rós and Supergrass on the bill. About 42,000 people came; Alex Ross wrote that it may have been the biggest public gathering Oxford had ever seen. The £145,000 it raised went to local charities, among them the Samaritans and the Orchestra of St John's, who had played on Kid A and Amnesiac.

one of the biggest days in my life

thom yorke · parlophone interview disc, 22 april 2003

Then someone wrote it off. On the same interview disc he said he could not get over a writer who, simply because they had a keyboard in front of them, could dismiss an event that had meant so much to so many people. The critic is not named, and the song does not name them either.

nobody knows what's going on

The band describe it as funk-influenced, and Yorke said it was about more than one review: it also carried the helplessness he felt watching world events in those years. Asked by M-Web about the title, he gave a picture rather than an explanation.

it's just like a punch up at a wedding. Nobody knows what's going on.

thom yorke · m-web, 2003

Chuck Klosterman, in Spin, heard a narrative about the stock reactions to a social blunder. The words are an accusation built almost entirely out of worn-out idioms and insults, aimed at someone who turned up to start a fight and spoil the big day. Kate Livett, in the Australian Humanities Review, listed its idioms among the stock phrases the album turns against themselves. The full title adds “(No no no no no no no no.)”, and the site's own transcription of the lyric opens on the word “no”, over and over.

fifty-one nights

It was one of the songs aired on the Spain and Portugal tour, first in Lisbon on 22 July 2002, ten nights that summer, the last of them in Salamanca on 7 August. It came back at the Olympia in Dublin on 17 May 2003 and was played 41 times that year. The last is The Point in Dublin on 4 December 2003. Fifty-one nights, never an opener or a closer, and not heard since.

cut, twice

In 2008 Yorke posted his own alternative running order for the album on Radiohead's website, and this was one of the four songs missing. Angie Martoccio of Rolling Stone called it the most alarming absence on that list, and one of the band's most underrated songs. Niall Doherty, writing for Louder in 2025, put it on his list of the album's half-baked tracks. The live album of 2025 left it off, with “Backdrifts”, to fit on vinyl.