A Reminder

a sunday near hershey

Thom Yorke wrote it on one of the empty days a tour leaves behind, a Sunday somewhere near Hershey, with nothing to do but sit in the hotel room. What came out of it was a song meant as a pact between two people, to be used if one of them ever forgot who they had been.

I had this idea of someone writing a song, sending it to someone, and saying: ‘If I ever lose it, you just pick up the phone and play this song back to remind me.’

thom yorke · quoted in tim footman, welcome to the machine

It is recorded the way such a call might sound, a little hazy. It opens on voices speaking Czech, a train is sampled into it, and the band play electric piano, fuzzed guitar and drums that thump more than they drive. One of two of the fourteen nearly finished songs, with “Polyethylene”, that missed the record, it went out on the second CD of the “Paranoid Android” single in May 1997, then on Airbag / How Am I Driving?, and twenty years later on OKNOTOK.

doncaster to niigata

It was in the set on the first night of the British tour, at the Dome in Doncaster on 2 September 1997, and again the next night at the London Astoria. That was a fan-club show, and Ed O'Brien had promised NME a section of nothing but B-sides; Yorke went on after a night up with food poisoning, and Mat Smith, reviewing it for the paper, thought the B-sides were played out of duty. It came back in Japan in January 1998, in Sendai and then in Niigata on 14 January 1998, and that was the last of it.

the eighteenth disc

In June 2019 the band put out MINIDISCS [HACKED], 18 minidiscs of tapes from the OK Computer years, most of them about an hour long, with the money going to Extinction Rebellion. Darran Anderson of The Quietus sat through all of it and put the high point on the very last disc, where this song is sung unaccompanied.