Nude

failure to receive repayment

It goes back to the first OK Computer sessions, under a run of working titles: “Failure to Receive Repayment Will Put Your House at Risk”, “Big Ideas”, “(Don't Get Any) Big Ideas”. The name it ended up with, “Nude”, comes from a line in an early version of the chorus.

After The Bends the band booked a weekend in a studio with Nigel Godrich as a try-out, and the weekend turned into the start of OK Computer. Thom Yorke had just written this song, and it was one of the two they cut. The idea then was an Al Green record with a Hammond organ running through it, with other words and a straighter feel. They thought it had worked, and then went off it.

the song that would not come

Yorke first played it alone on acoustic guitar, in the encore at Akasaka Blitz in Tokyo on 23 January 1998, and the full band took it up in Dallas that March. In San Francisco a few nights later he introduced it only as “Untitled”. For a decade it came and went from the set, one of their best-known unreleased songs, while the studio kept beating them: a couple more tries for OK Computer, about three for Kid A and about three more for Hail to the Thief.

I considered asking Elvis Costello and the Attractions to record it, feeling they would do a better job, but I did not have the courage.

thom yorke · rolling stone, may 2004

Godrich once drew up a list of Yorke's unrecorded songs and warned the band what would happen to them.

And if you don't fucking record them, I'm going to fucking do it! I'll do a covers album!

nigel godrich · the word, june 2008

colin's bassline

In February 2006 Yorke wrote on the band's site that they were working on it again, with Jonny Greenwood hurrying out parts for a string quartet booked for the next day. Colin Greenwood was the one who fixed it. He played Godrich a rough recording of a rehearsal with a new bassline, which in Godrich's words turned it from something very straight into something with a rhythmic flow. They cut the chorus, wrote a new vocal break and a new ending, played the new version on the 2006 tour, and then recorded it three times. The last take is the record, with overdubs done at Godrich's studio in the Hospital Club in Covent Garden.

Yorke had never enjoyed singing it, calling it “too feminine, too high”.

Now I enjoy it exactly for that reason, because it is a bit uncomfortable, a bit out of my range, and it's really difficult to do. And it brings something out in me.

thom yorke · mojo, january 2008

Godrich's view was that in ten years the song had hardly changed; the people playing it had.

no bright ideas

At the Empress Ballroom in Blackpool on 12 May 2006, the first British night of that tour, Yorke said it had been kicking around for a while: “It is called 'Nude' so don't get any bright ideas.” A few nights later, at Wolverhampton, he thought they had finally nailed it, and then added that this was under debate too.

the stems

It was the second single from In Rainbows, out on 31 March 2008, and to go with it the band broke it into five parts, bass, voice, guitar, strings and drums, and sold them through iTunes so that anyone could remix it. Fans uploaded 2,254 mixes to the band's remix site to be voted on. The sales of the parts counted towards the single, which reached 21 in Britain and 37 on the Billboard Hot 100, Radiohead's first American top-40 single since “Creep” and their first Hot 100 entry of any kind since “High and Dry”. It went to number two in Italy, and into the top ten in Canada, Finland and the Netherlands.

One answer to the invitation came from James Houston, a 21-year-old student at Glasgow School of Art, who played the song on a ZX Spectrum, a dot matrix printer, a scanner and a row of old hard drives, and called his film “Big Ideas (Don't Get Any)”. Colin put it up on the band's blog in June, saying he and Jonny had had “a spectrum flashback moment”.