Airbag

a headline in the post

The title was a headline before it was a song. The note on the 2003 site has Yorke finding “An Airbag Saved My Life” in an Automobile Association publication that came in the post, with a nod in the working title to Indeep's “Last Night a D.J. Saved My Life”.

He told Q in October 1997 that it was about the idea that any trip on the road could kill you. Crash imagery went in beside the reincarnation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead: the wreck, then birth again. Ultimate Classic Rock traces the fear back a decade, to a car accident in which his girlfriend was hurt and he walked away. The BBC, writing in 2009, put the song next to J. G. Ballard's Crash.

Twenty years on, Yorke told Rolling Stone the song was nearly the opposite of the fear. Walking away from a near miss is what it is about.

You feel a thousand times more alive.

thom yorke · rolling stone, 16 june 2017

He was also borrowing a method from Michael Stipe that year: lines of semi-nonsense that only add up once they are stacked together. In Select he suggested pulling over after every near accident and running down the street shouting that you are alive.

a day and a half on a loop

It was recorded at St Catherine's Court, Jane Seymour's house near Bath. Selway credited DJ Shadow in Melody Maker: the way Shadow cut up beats was what they were after. Selway played for around fifteen minutes into a sampler, and the part was cut down on a Macintosh to the three-second loop that carries the song. In Guitar World the band admitted their programming only approximated Shadow's.

Nigel Godrich remembered setting Yorke and Selway to make the loop in a couple of hours. It took a day and a half, and it sounded flat. So he ran it through Jonny Greenwood's pedal board, did three passes of mangling, and used all three.

It's a departure from a rock band.

nigel godrich · rolling stone, 16 june 2017

Colin Greenwood's bass drops out and comes back without warning, a habit Tim Footman traces to 1970s dub, and Jonny adds Mellotron. Ranking it 16th among Radiohead songs in 2020, the Guardian heard “some Maxinquaye basslines” in it.

first track, then an ep

It opens the album and runs straight into “Paranoid Android”. In North America Capitol put it at the head of Airbag / How Am I Driving? on 21 April 1998, an EP of the OK Computer B-sides with an edit of the song that ends cold. The EP entered the Billboard 200 at 56 and was nominated for the Grammy for Best Alternative Music Performance. A live “Airbag” recorded in Berlin went on the “No Surprises” single.

the way in

It was first played on 28 October 1995 at XFM's studios in London, a year and a half before anyone could buy it, and seventy-two times in 1997. The archive has it on 308 nights and at the top of the set on 74 of them. After Philadelphia on 31 July 2018 it went missing for 2,654 days, until Madrid on 5 November 2025. The last time was Copenhagen, 16 December 2025.

a book and a dub

In 2016 Yorke gave his own copy of Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience to Dreweatts & Bloomsbury for a sale on 18 March, proceeds to Oxfam. Inside it was a draft of these words, crossed-out lines and all, beside his notes on Blake. The estimate was £800 to £1,200.

Horace Andy sang it on Radiodread, the Easy Star All-Stars' 2006 reggae remake of the whole album, which also carries a version called “An Airbag Saved My Dub”.