Climbing Up the Walls

the hospital

Yorke once worked as an orderly in a mental hospital, around the time Care in the Community began closing the institutions. He told Select in 1997 that the staff all knew what was coming. Twenty years later he gave Rolling Stone the detail: a home for the severely ill in a small village, and one night a patient got out. The man was harmless, and very ill, and what stayed with Yorke was the picture of him in the middle of a field with the police after him.

The second strand was a newspaper story about an ordinary domestic killing by someone who was not well. Humo in 1997 had it as a New York Times article about serial killers. Either way, Yorke said he was fascinated by the moment a person who has got through life snaps, and by the idea that people are not looked after as they should be. To Select he talked about people too frightened to sleep with the curtains open, and about panic buttons by the bed, and 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

It was recorded at St Catherine's Court, in the library, which Ed O'Brien said gave it its gothic feel; some of the sound effects, the insect noises among them, went on later. It was hailing hard on the day, and Yorke thought that helped. Selway, unsettled by the house's ghosts, remembered going to bed with the duvet pulled up to his nose, and said you can hear that wired feeling on this track.

Under the vocal is metallic, repetitive percussion and a bed of ambient noise, and Yorke's voice gives way to a scream by the end.

not “eleanor rigby”

Jonny Greenwood wrote the strings for sixteen instruments, after Krzysztof Penderecki's Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima (1960), with the players set a quarter-tone apart from one another. He told the Guardian what the attraction was.

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

jonny greenwood · the guardian, 20 december 1997

Caitlin Moran in Select heard Greenwood whipping up “a million dying elephants” behind Yorke's scream.

Colin Greenwood explained its place in the running order to Humo: frighten the listener here, then soothe them with “No Surprises”, which follows it.

remixed

Two remixes came out on the second UK CD of “Karma Police” in August 1997: Zero 7's (5:19) and Fila Brazillia's (6:24). The Zero 7 mix was also on the 12-inch, and the Fila Brazillia one turned up again on the “Lucky” single.

on stage

Ed O'Brien listed it among the new songs they played to Alanis Morissette's crowds in 1996, when hardly anyone there knew anything but “Creep”. The archive's first night for it is Great Woods in Mansfield on 14 August 1996. Sixty-nine performances followed in 1997. The 2003 site noted the cue: Jonny Greenwood with a small radio, tuning across whatever local classical or news stations he had found at soundcheck, never rock.

The archive counts 245 nights, three as the opener and two as the closer. After Pittsburgh on 26 July 2018 it vanished for 2,678 days, and came back at the O2 in London on 24 November 2025.

Tamar-kali sang it on Radiodread, the Easy Star All-Stars' reggae OK Computer of 2006.