All I Need

chicago, not quite ready

They played it for the first time at the Auditorium Theatre in Chicago on 20 June 2006. Yorke told the audience they had “sketched [the song] out earlier and might get it wrong”.

Somebody in the room 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 Jonny Greenwood wanted was the white noise a band makes in a loud room, which does not happen in a studio. His solution was to have the Millennia Ensemble play every note of the scale at the same time, blanketing the frequency range, and then to overdub 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. Yorke said the finished track is four different recordings spliced into one.

The result is a slow build of bass, glockenspiel, piano and strings that breaks on Selway's crash cymbals and the line “it's all right, it's all wrong”, which is the loudest release on the record.

an animal trapped in your hot car

Obsession and one-sided love, told through images of being caged: Yorke describes himself as “an animal trapped in your hot car”. The Telegraph called it his most direct love song; Rolling Stone called it among the most intense he has ever sung.

the video

The video premiered on MTV on 1 May 2008, made with the MTV EXIT campaign against human trafficking and forced labour. It cuts between the days of two boys, one going to school, one working, and it won sixteen awards. In January 2009 the song was released to American adult album alternative radio as a promo.

in the set

The Chicago sketch turned into a fixture: fifty-three performances in 2008, 137 nights in the archive, ten of them as the opener, most recently Tokyo on 7 October 2008.