All I Need

chicago, filmed on a phone

Radiohead first played it at the Auditorium Theatre in Chicago on 20 June 2006, the second of their two nights there, with Thom Yorke at the piano and Jonny Greenwood on bells. Yorke introduced it to the room as “we sketched it out earlier and we might get it wrong”.

Somebody in the audience filmed it on a phone and put it on YouTube, and when the band came to record the song properly they kept going back to that clip.

It's all crunchy, it's all from mobile phone but… that's sort of an element of it I really find incredibly exciting.

thom yorke · xfm, 3 january 2008

every note at once

What Greenwood was after was the white noise a band makes in a loud room, which never happens in a studio. He had the Millennia Ensemble, a string section, play every note of the scale at the same time, blanketing the whole range, and overdubbed his own viola on top. Ed O'Brien strung a guitar with four bottom E strings and ran it through a sustainer and a delay, and Yorke reckoned the finished track was four different recordings spliced into one.

It builds slowly on bass, glockenspiel, piano and strings until it breaks on Phil Selway's crash cymbals and the line “it's all wrong, it's all right”.

an animal in a hot car

It is about obsession, and love that only goes one way, with Yorke singing himself as something caged, “an animal trapped in your hot car”. Robert Sandall, reviewing the album for the Telegraph, called it Yorke's most direct love song.

the shoes in the film

MTV asked to use it about two months before its film came out, O'Brien told Radio 1's Newsbeat, and the band looked into the campaign and said yes. The film premiered on MTV's channels on 1 May 2008, made for MTV EXIT, the network's campaign against human trafficking and forced labour. Steve Rogers directed it. The screen is split in two, with a day in the life of a boy in a comfortable Western home on one side and, on the other, a boy in a sweatshop making the shoes the first boy wears. Yorke told The Hollywood Reporter that MTV's “lawyers had to beg to make sure there wasn't a single white trainer with a logo on it”. The film went on to win 16 awards, a bronze Lion at Cannes among them.

In January 2009 the song went to American adult album alternative radio as a promo.

every tour

The Chicago sketch has been on every tour since, 137 nights in all. In 2008, when it was in the set on fifty-three nights, it sometimes opened the show.