Backdrifts

a light, a smell

The promotional interview disc Parlophone sent to the British music press on 22 April 2003 had Yorke putting the song in one line: it was about “the slide backwards that's happening everywhere you look”. That was the tidy version.

Asked by M-Web whether “Backdrifts” was a bleak picture of the world, he gave the untidy one. The words were ambivalent on purpose, he said, and the song came from a particular light he had seen and a particular smell. What he kept running into was panic, and the song ended up with a fluorescent light in it. Then he admitted that was probably not much help, and sighed.

Basically this pure blind panic which I kept encountering in different forms.

thom yorke · m-web, 2003

Jonny Greenwood took the same question as an engineering problem. For him it was the song where they finally got all the boxes and machines talking to each other (M-Web, 2003).

an advance study

Nick Collins, reviewing the band's last three albums for Computer Music Journal, picked this and “The Gloaming” as the two tracks most worth his readers' attention, and heard “Like Spinning Plates” from Amnesiac as the sketch for both. Under “Backdrifts” he found a sequence of reversed, slow-attack sounds, the rhythms of early commercial drum machines and resonant pulses.

backdrifting

The full title is “Backdrifts. (Honeymoon Is Over.)”. The lyric keeps changing its verb, drifting, then sliding, then tracking backwards, and it is written mostly in the first person plural: a “we” admitting it is spoiled goods, and a “you” who has buried the evidence and wiped the tapes but is given away by footsteps. Kate Livett, writing in the Australian Humanities Review in 2007, counted those buried evidence and erased tapes among the stock phrases the whole album is saturated with, and read them as a way of saying what cannot quite be said.

fifty nights

It was not part of the Spain and Portugal tour of July and August 2002, where most of the new songs were tried in public. The archive's first “Backdrifts” is the Olympia Theatre in Dublin on 17 May 2003, the same night “The Gloaming” arrived.

It was played 45 times that year. After The Point in Dublin on 3 December 2003 it went away for 133 days and came back at Intex Osaka on 14 April 2004. Five nights in 2004, the last at Rod Laver Arena in Melbourne on 26 April, and that was it: fifty nights in all, never an opener, never a closer, and not played since.

missing, then found

When Yorke posted his own alternative running order for the album on Radiohead's website in 2008, “Backdrifts” was one of four songs he took out. In August 2025 it was cut again: Hail to the Thief (Live Recordings 2003–2009) dropped it and “A Punchup at a Wedding” to fit the record on vinyl, which Rob Sheffield noted in Rolling Stone.

On 31 October 2025, the day the CD and vinyl came out, subscribers to the W.A.S.T.E. newsletter were sent a live “Backdrifts” as a free download. The note with it said the track had been missing from the live album and could now be considered found.