Burn the Witch

the song that kept not happening

They started it during the Kid A sessions and came back to it for Hail to the Thief and again for In Rainbows. The title is printed in the Hail to the Thief booklet artwork. Yorke mentioned it on the band's blog in 2005 and posted lyrics in 2007. Twice, in 2006 and 2008, he played a few of its chords on stage and told the audience they would do it properly “when we get the orchestra”.

Asked about it in 2013, Nigel Godrich was patient about the whole category of unfinished Radiohead songs: “Everything will surface one day… it all exists… and so it will eventually get there, I'm sure.” He pointed at “Nude”, released in 2007 and written twelve years earlier.

written for strings, left unfinished on purpose

When it finally came together, the strings were not decoration. Jonny Greenwood, who writes Radiohead's orchestral parts, said they 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

The London Contemporary Orchestra recorded at RAK in London, conducted by Hugh Brunt, both of whom Greenwood knew from his score for The Master. Instead of bows the players used guitar plectrums, which is where the chugging, percussive attack comes from. Pitchfork heard a section that “alternates between sumptuous flourishes and the darkest corners of The Shining's score”; the Atlantic heard heavy metal. In the second half the parts come apart: cellos and basses hold a conventional progression while the high strings go, in one analysis, deathly.

Godrich's father died that day.

I literally left him on a fucking table in my house and went and recorded. And it was a very, very emotional day for me. 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

abandon all reason

“Abandon all reason / avoid all eye contact / do not react / shoot the messengers / burn the witch”: a set of instructions for joining a mob. Yorke traced the lyrics back to the News of the World printing the names and addresses of sex offenders in 2000.

wicker man in trumptonshire

A week before the album, people who had ordered from the band in the past received embossed cards through the post: “Sing a song of sixpence that goes / burn the witch / we know where you live.”

The video, directed by Chris Hopewell, who had made “There There”, was conceived and finished in fourteen days. It is stop-motion in the style of the 1960s Trumptonshire children's programmes, telling the plot of The Wicker Man: an inspector is shown around a bright rural village by its mayor, the sights get worse, a wicker man is unveiled, he is invited inside and locked in, and as it burns the villagers turn their backs and wave at the camera. This inspector gets out through the trees.

The animator Virpi Kettu said the contrast was deliberate: the band “wanted the video to contrast with what they're playing and to wake people up a bit”. She read the song as being about the migrant crisis and the scapegoating of Muslims. Pitchfork read the idyllic English village as a comment on family-values rhetoric. Gordon Murray's family, who own Trumptonshire, had not been asked, and called it a tarnishing of the brand.

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

released

It went out as a download on 3 May 2016 from the band's own site, the lead single from A Moon Shaped Pool, with a 7-inch following on 13 May sold only through independent record shops, backed with “Spectre”. It was the 26th-bestselling vinyl single of the year in Britain and was nominated for Best Rock Song at the Grammys. Rolling Stone, Billboard and the Village Voice all put it among the best songs of 2016. Pitchfork called it the band's most “unsettling and gorgeous” song since “How to Disappear Completely”.

A Radiohead melody has rarely sounded this joyful or indulgent, which puts the disturbing lyrics into especially sharp relief.

larry bartleet · nme, 3 may 2016

the opener

Having waited sixteen years, it went straight to the front of the show: first played in Amsterdam on 20 May 2016, twenty-six performances that year, and of the 41 nights in the archive it has opened twenty-six of them.