Burn the Witch

the song that kept not happening

Radiohead started it during the Kid A sessions and came back to it for Hail to the Thief, whose booklet artwork prints the title, and again for In Rainbows. On 28 September 2005 Thom Yorke wrote on Dead Air Space, the band's blog, that he had the words to “Burn the Witch”, a good one, and that it was one of many songs Jonny Greenwood now had to orchestrate. Two days later the band posted a photograph of a studio blackboard, and “orchestration” is chalked beside its title.

Twice, in 2006 and 2008, Yorke played a few of its chords on stage and told the audience they would do it properly “when we get the orchestra”. In October 2012 Greenwood was still hoping, telling Uncut readers it could be great if they ever got the arrangement sorted out.

room for the strings

Greenwood wrote the parts for the London Contemporary Orchestra, and this time the band built the song around the space where they would go.

We left it unfinished on purpose and left lots of room for the strings and we never do that usually. Usually the strings are the icing on top.

jonny greenwood · bbc news, 16 june 2016

They recorded at RAK in London under Hugh Brunt, whom Greenwood knew from his score for The Master. The players struck the strings with guitar plectrums instead of bowing them, which is where the chugging attack comes from. Greenwood likes to move a technique from one instrument to another, and when he told The Talks about the habit in 2026, a plectrum on violins and violas and a cello bow on the guitar for this song were his examples. In the second half the parts come apart, the cellos and basses holding to a conventional progression while the high strings turn, in Daniel Ross's analysis for Classic FM, deathly.

Nigel Godrich's father died on the day of the session, and Godrich went to the studio anyway.

He was a string player as well so it was one of those things where it felt like he would want me to go and just do this.

nigel godrich · rolling stone, 8 june 2017

a mob's instructions

The lyric is a list of orders for joining a mob: give up thinking, avoid each other's eyes, show nothing, punish the people who bring the news, and burn the witch. Yorke traced it to the News of the World printing the names and addresses of sex offenders in 2000.

released

It went out as a download from the band's site on 3 May 2016, the first song from A Moon Shaped Pool, and a 7-inch backed with “Spectre” followed on 13 May, sold only through independent record shops; it was the 26th-bestselling vinyl single of the year in Britain. Pitchfork called it the most unsettling and gorgeous song the band had made since “How to Disappear Completely”, and Larry Bartleet at NME thought the tune so joyful that the words sounded all the worse for it. It was nominated for Best Rock Song at the Grammys.

the opener

Having waited sixteen years, it went straight to the front of the show. Every gig of 2016 opened with it, from Amsterdam on 20 May to Austin on 7 October 2016, with “Daydreaming” straight after, and at the Roundhouse in London on 26 May Greenwood had his bow on a Telecaster. In 2017 it usually came deep in the second half of the set, but at the KeyArena in Seattle that April it came near the middle, and Yorke spoke the verses more than he sang them; more phones went up for it than for anything earlier in the night.

the trumptonshire video

A week before the album, people who had bought from the band in the past found embossed cards in the post, with a line from a nursery rhyme, the song's title and a warning that the sender knew where they lived.

The video, directed by Chris Hopewell, who had made “There There”, was conceived and finished in 14 days. It is stop-motion in the style of the 1960s Trumptonshire children's programmes, telling the story of The Wicker Man. An inspector is shown round a bright village by its mayor, the sights get worse, and he is invited into a wicker man and locked in; as it burns, the villagers turn their backs and wave at the camera, and, unlike the policeman in the film, this inspector gets out through the trees. Virpi Kettu, the animator, said the band wanted the video to work against the music and wake people up a bit, and she read the song as being about the migrant crisis and the scapegoating of Muslims. The family of Trumptonshire's creator, Gordon Murray, who own it, had not been asked, and said it tarnished the brand.

When Donald Trump won the American election that November, Yorke posted the song's words and a link to the video.