A Wolf at the Door

needs thom's rant

It is older than Hail to the Thief by three years. Ed O'Brien's online diary has the band trying it on 8 December 1999, during the Kid A sessions, under a longer name, at the end of what he called a fragmented day.

it's too late and needs thom's rant on it.

ed o'brien · online diary, 8 december 1999

The 2003 version of this site kept a page for it under that name, “Keep The Wolf From The Door”, with nothing on it but that diary line.

lisbon, night two

It was first played on 23 July 2002, the second of three nights at the Coliseu dos Recreios in Lisbon. NME reported it that week as “Keep The Wolf From The Door” and, a few days later, as “Wolf From The Door”, and Johnny Davis singled out O'Brien's guitar line. The 2003 site noted that it might also be called “Stepford Wives”.

the music and the words

Chuck Klosterman, who spent eight hours with the band in an Oxford hotel for Spin in 2003, reported that Jonny Greenwood wrote all of it and Yorke just added the words. The words came from a train. Yorke found himself in a carriage with a party of unruly men, and what he wrote is his side of that trip: a stream of nursery-rhyme threats, a protection racket, a ransom call, money and cold marriages, and a man at the end of his patience asking to be taken away. The chorus, about keeping the wolf from the door, is sung rather than ranted. The full title adds “(It Girl. Rag Doll.)”.

The contrast is the point. Greenwood's music is light and almost pretty; Yorke half-sings, half-talks at speed over it.

A pretty song, with a sinister monologue.

john robinson · nme, 10 may 2003

a glass of water

It is the fourteenth and last track. Yorke said it was there to wake the listener at the end, as if the whole record had been a nightmare and you needed to go and get a glass of water now. Michael Stipe told the German magazine Galore that when he first heard it he ground his teeth and decided he could do better. In October 2003 two pieces of it turned up in a Dutch trailer for a new series on Net5.

Michael Nelson at Stereogum, ten years later, counted it among the album's three best songs. David Cheal ended his Daily Telegraph playlist of Radiohead's ten bleakest moments on it, on 15 August 2005.

new lines

On 23 September 2014 Yorke posted an image of the song's words on Twitter with new lines added that had never been in it. NME took it, with a white label he had put up the day before, as a sign that the band were back at work.

on stage

The archive has it on 66 nights, 25 of them in 2003, the year of the record, and a handful in most of the years the band has toured since. It has never opened or closed a show; it has, on the other hand, turned up in almost every era of the band since. At the Schottenstein Center in Columbus on 23 July 2018 it opened the second encore.

After the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia on 31 July 2018 it was away 2,653 days, back at the Movistar Arena in Madrid on 4 November 2025, sixteenth in the set on Radiohead's first night on stage in seven years. The last so far was Copenhagen on 15 December 2025. It closes Hail to the Thief (Live Recordings 2003–2009), released by XL on 13 August 2025, as it closes the album.