Blow Out

the closer on the first record

It ends Pablo Honey and does not sound much like the eleven songs before it. Phil Selway's hi-hats tick like a jazz drummer's under raked, clean chords; Gary Walker at Guitar.com heard Jeff Buckley in the opening. Then the guitars take over and the last stretch dissolves into shoegaze noise, which Annie Zaleski in Salon lined up with Sonic Youth.

Phil Witmer wrote a music-theory piece for Vice on the album's 25th anniversary and put this and “You” at either end of it as the two songs that point forward. He called the verses bossa-krautrock and noted that the band were still working the same jazz-rock grooves on Amnesiac in 2001. He also thought the guitars got impatient before the mood had finished its job.

ice-cool, bossa-krautrock verses and strong, melancholic melody

phil witmer · vice, 22 february 2018

later readings

Q put it among twenty essential lesser-known Radiohead songs in its “500 Greatest Lost Tracks” of February 2007, with “Lurgee”. Reviewing the 2009 collector's edition for Paste, Mark Kemp scored Pablo Honey 65 out of 100 and picked the end of this song as an early sign of the guitar playing Jonny Greenwood would be known for. Shawn Hammond, profiling Ed O'Brien for Premier Guitar in 2017, heard the two guitarists already swinging between off-kilter jazz chords and noise-rock implosions.

glimpses of future brilliance

shawn hammond · premier guitar, 28 november 2017

A remix went on the Japanese CD of “Creep”. Lo-Freq covered it for Exit Music: Songs for Radioheads, the 2006 compilation of other people's versions. In 2004 Grant Huling named his Oberlin College Experimental College course after it: “Blow Out: The Radiohead Exco”.

the way the night ended

The archive's first performance is The Venue in New Cross, London, on 27 March 1992. Of its 107 nights, 58 ended with it, and it never once opened a show. Thirty-three of them came in 1993. It closed the filmed set at the London Astoria on 27 May 1994. On 22 March 1996 Yorke played it alone on acoustic guitar in a CBC session in Vancouver, with Ken Stringfellow and John Auer of the Posies making up parts beside him.

two returns

After the E-Werk in Cologne on 2 July 1997 it went quiet for 4,115 days, until the Tokyo International Forum on 7 October 2008; the archive has two nights that year. Then another decade. At the United Center in Chicago on 6 July 2018, the opening night of the North American tour, it came back to start the second encore. Ed O'Brien, talking to Rolling Stone in 2020, cited that tour's habit of changing the set every night, and this song being in it, as the band loosening up. Chicago is the last performance on record.