Bodysnatchers

neu! meets wolfmother

It is older than the record by two years. In March 2006, while the band were still producing themselves, Colin Greenwood listed it for NME among the new songs the band really loved, and Mark “Spike” Stent worked up an early version during his short spell in charge, February to April that year.

Yorke gave Nick Kent the formula in Amsterdam on 11 May 2006: Neu! crossed with “dodgy hippy rock”. It reminded him of Wolfmother, a new Australian band he liked because they so plainly did not care what anyone thought.

Its first night was 1 May 2006 at Koko in Camden, an acoustic warm-up set by Yorke and Jonny Greenwood for Friends of the Earth's Big Ask. Nigel Godrich, not yet back as their producer, watched from the crowd. From the first Copenhagen show on 6 May the full band played it almost every night of the European and UK legs, and Mojo's Danny Eccleston gave it four stars, hearing Phil Selway's snare sitting motorik on top of the beat.

tottenham house

Godrich got them back in October 2006 at Tottenham House outside Marlborough, a Palladian pile nobody had kept up. The band slept in caravans for three weeks, dodged the rat poison, and Yorke told NME there was no working toilet and the top windows blew out when the wind got up. Jonny Greenwood remembered a room with just a guitar, a drum kit and an amp, and playing bad blues rock in it at three in the morning.

This was the take. Ed O'Brien said on 6 Music it was a live recording made roughly the second time they played it; Yorke and Jonny both told Mojo it is the one track on In Rainbows where all five are playing together.

You can definitely hear the atmosphere of the place on that.

thom yorke · mojo, february 2008

Yorke's own account is stranger. Just before he gets properly ill, he told NME, he has about twelve hours of hyperactive mania, and the song went down during one of them. The vocal is a single take, left as it was. His guitar had to be tidied up afterwards because he was too far gone to play it straight.

ghost stories

Yorke told Jon Pareles of the New York Times where the lyric came from: Victorian ghost stories, The Stepford Wives, and the sense of being shut inside your own body, unable to reach anything outside it. Before the album was even announced it was leaking out in code. In September 2007 radiohead.com carried a run of glyphs, and the most common theory among fans, the Guardian reported, was that decoded they spelled out words from this song.

the radio song

Mark Pytlik in Pitchfork heard a sludgy riff that grinds along until about the two-minute mark, when the band swerve into an acoustic passage. NME's Julian Marshall went further.

perhaps the most aggressive-sounding Radiohead track to date

julian marshall · nme, 8 december 2007

Zane Lowe played it to open his Radio 1 hour with Yorke and O'Brien in November 2007. ATO had already sent it to American radio, and in February 2008 it reached number eight on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart, their best placing there since “Creep” went to number two in 1993. It also made 22 on Canada's rock chart and 34 on the Japan Hot 100. In Britain it went out in May 2008 as a promotional single with “House of Cards”, and the band played it for In Rainbows – From the Basement that year.

on stage

The archive has it on 210 nights: 24 in 2006, 54 in 2008, 37 in 2012. It has opened a show once and closed one three times. After Philadelphia on 31 July 2018 it went missing for 2,653 days, back in Madrid on 4 November 2025, and the last night on file is Copenhagen, 16 December 2025.