Airbag

a headline in the post

The title was a headline before it was a song. The note on the 2003 site has Thom 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 thought that any trip on the road could kill you, and the crash imagery sits beside the reincarnation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead: the wreck, then birth again. Behind it was a real accident a decade earlier, in which his girlfriend was hurt and he walked away.

Twenty years on he told Rolling Stone it was nearly the opposite of a song about fear. It is about walking away.

You feel a thousand times more alive.

thom yorke · rolling stone, 16 june 2017

When he wrote it he was borrowing a method from Michael Stipe, lines of near-nonsense that only add up once they are stacked together. In Select in 1997 he suggested pulling over after every near miss and running down the street shouting that you are alive.

a day and a half on a loop

They recorded it at St Catherine's Court, Jane Seymour's house near Bath. Colin Greenwood and Phil Selway wanted it to sound like DJ Shadow, and in Melody Maker Selway said it was the way Shadow cut up beats they were after. He drummed for around fifteen minutes into a sampler, and the part was cut down on a Macintosh to the three-second loop the song runs on. Selway admitted the result did not really sound like what they had been aiming for.

Nigel Godrich had given Yorke and Selway a couple of hours to make the loop. It took a day and a half and still sounded flat, so he ran it through Jonny's pedal board, mangled it three times over and used all three passes.

Colin's bass drops out and comes back without warning, a habit the writer Tim Footman traces to 1970s dub, and Jonny adds Mellotron on top.

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, and in 2006 Horace Andy sang it on Radiodread, the Easy Star All-Stars' reggae remake of the album.

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 through 1997 and 1998 it opened more than half the shows it was in. At the Pacific Coliseum in Vancouver on 6 April 1998 it did not get far. Fans at the front were being crushed, and Yorke signalled Ed O'Brien to stop.

There are a lot of people getting squashed, so if you want us to fucking go off we will. Please don't. We really, really want to play to you.

thom yorke · nme, april 1998

Security cleared the front, and a quarter of an hour later they started again with “Airbag”. It last opened a show in Saint-Cloud on 26 August 2006, and after Philadelphia on 31 July 2018 it was away for 2,654 days, until Madrid on 5 November 2025.

the draft in the blake

In 2016 Yorke gave his own copy of William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience to Dreweatts & Bloomsbury to auction for Oxfam. Inside, beside his notes on Blake, was a draft of these words, crossed-out lines and all.