Bodysnatchers

two years before the record

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

Thom Yorke described it to Nick Kent in Amsterdam on 11 May 2006 as 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 at KOKO in Camden on 1 May 2006, a benefit for Friends of the Earth's Big Ask at which Yorke and Jonny Greenwood played it as a duo, fast and on an acoustic riff. Nigel Godrich, not yet back as their producer, watched from the balcony. From the first Copenhagen show on 6 May the full band played it almost every night of the May dates in Europe and Britain.

tottenham house

Godrich had 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 and 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 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.

The album take comes from there. Ed O'Brien said on 6 Music that it was recorded live, roughly the second time they played it, and Yorke and Jonny both told Mojo all five played on it together.

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

thom yorke · mojo, february 2008

Yorke told NME that just before he gets properly ill he has about twelve hours of hyperactive mania, and the song went down during one of those spells. 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.

the single

Mark Pytlik's Pitchfork review has the sludgy riff grinding on to about the two-minute mark, where the band swerve into an acoustic passage, and Julian Marshall in NME thought it perhaps the most aggressive-sounding thing they had recorded. Zane Lowe played it to open his Radio 1 hour with Yorke and O'Brien in November 2007.

ATO, which put the album out in North America on TBD Records, had already sent it to radio there, 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.

colin's pedal

It has been in the set on almost every tour since KOKO, 54 nights in 2008 alone and 210 in the archive. At Reading on 30 August 2009, headlining the festival for the first time, Yorke said almost nothing between songs, except before this one, when he did the noise of a broken pedal for the crowd: “Colin's bass pedal just went chuuk.”

The longest gap began after Philadelphia on 31 July 2018 and lasted 2,653 days, until Madrid on 4 November 2025. It was then played on most nights of that winter's European run.

ghost stories

Yorke told Jon Pareles of the New York Times that the lyric came out of Victorian ghost stories, The Stepford Wives and the sense of being shut inside a body, unable to reach anything outside it. Before the album was even announced it was leaking out in code. In September 2007 the band's blog carried a run of messages in a symbol alphabet, and the fans who worked them out found that the first of them were words from this song.