Climbing Up the Walls

the hospital

Thom Yorke once worked as an orderly in a mental hospital, as Care in the Community came in and the institutions began to close, which he told The Times in 1997 was one of the scariest things to have happened in the country. He told Select the staff all knew what was coming. Twenty years later he told Rolling Stone about a home for the severely mentally ill in a small village, and the night a patient got out. The man was harmless and very ill, and what stayed with Yorke was the sight of him in the middle of a field with the police coming for him.

The second strand was a newspaper story. In 2017 Yorke remembered it as an ordinary domestic murder by someone who was plainly not well; in 1997 he had told Humo it was a New York Times report that eight of every ten mass murderers in American history had struck since 1980. Yorke was fascinated by the moment a person who has got through life snaps, and by how badly such people are looked after. To Select he talked about people too frightened to sleep with the curtains open, and the panic buttons by their beds, and he called the song his cupboard monster.

That one's a bit of a mystery to me, to be honest.

thom yorke · rolling stone, 16 june 2017

the library

They recorded it in the library at St Catherine's Court, which Ed O'Brien thought gave it its gothic feel; some of the sound effects, the insects among them, went on later. It hailed hard that day, and Yorke reckoned that helped. Phil Selway, unsettled by the house's ghosts, went to bed with the duvet pulled up to his nose, and said that wired feeling is on the track.

Under the vocal there is a metallic, repeating percussion part and a bed of ambient noise, and by the end Yorke's voice has given way to a scream.

sixteen strings

Jonny Greenwood wrote the strings for 16 instruments after Krzysztof Penderecki's Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima, and set the players a quarter-tone apart. He told NME in June 1997 that they had stolen a lot of Penderecki's string ideas.

String parts that didn't sound like ‘Eleanor Rigby’.

jonny greenwood · the guardian, 20 december 1997

Two remixes went on the second CD of “Karma Police” in August 1997, by Zero 7 and by Fila Brazillia, and the Fila Brazillia one turned up again on the “Lucky” single. In 2006 Tamar-kali sang it on Radiodread, the Easy Star All-Stars' reggae OK Computer.

the radio and the scream

O'Brien remembered it among the new songs they played to Alanis Morissette's crowds in 1996, when hardly anyone there knew anything of theirs but “Creep”, and the archive first has it at Great Woods in Mansfield on 14 August that year. On stage it began with Jonny tuning a small radio across whatever classical or news stations he had found at soundcheck, never rock, the 2003 version of this site remembered.

At the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles on 20 October 2000 it came in the encore, and Troy J. Augusto, reviewing for Variety, watched Jonny work the knobs of a sound module while Yorke screamed the last lines straight into the pickups of his acoustic guitar.

After Pittsburgh on 26 July 2018 it was gone 2,678 days. On the 2025 tour it came back at the O2 in London on 24 November, in a distorted new arrangement that Relix likened to dub.

the running order

Colin Greenwood told Humo why it sits where it does on the record. It is there to frighten the listener, so that “No Surprises”, which comes next, can calm them down again.