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 comes from an early version of the chorus, which asked what you look like when you are nude.

The version they cut with Godrich then was built on a Hammond organ, took after Al Green, had a straighter feel and different words. They liked it at first and then did not, and it stayed off the record.

the song they kept failing to record

Yorke played it alone in Japan in the late 1990s, and the band played it on and off for a decade, which made it one of their best-known unreleased songs. They tried again with Godrich during the Kid A sessions and again during Hail to the Thief, and were satisfied neither time.

In 2004 Yorke admitted he had thought about handing it to somebody else.

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

colin's bassline

What finally unlocked it was not a new arrangement of the whole song but one part. During the early In Rainbows sessions Colin Greenwood wrote a new bassline.

Transformed it from something very straight into something that had much more of a rhythmic flow.

nigel godrich · the word, 3 july 2011

They cut a chorus, wrote a new ending, played the new version on the 2006 tour, then recorded three takes. The last one 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 reading is that songs have a window when they are most alive and this one had missed its window; reinventing it caught it again, because the song had not changed, only the people playing it.

the stems

It was the second single from In Rainbows, released on 31 March 2008 with a video and a remix competition: the separated stems were put up for sale so anyone could rebuild it, and the entries were streamed on the band's own site.

Those stem sales pushed it onto the charts. It 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 top ten in Canada, Finland and the Netherlands. The Guardian heard it as “lushly romantic”; Pitchfork heard Yorke “wrenching as much sweetness out of it as he possibly can”.

on stage

First played in Tokyo on 23 January 1998, nearly a decade before it was released.