Codex

piano, flugelhorn, strings

“Codex” is where The King of Limbs stops clattering. Thom Yorke is at the piano, its chords smeared by a flanger, with a Roland TR-808 ticking underneath; Jon Dolan in Rolling Stone heard the beat as a very depressed heart monitor. Noel Langley and Yazz Ahmed, the pair who play flugelhorn on “Bloom”, come in over the top, and behind them sits the string section of the London Telefilmonic Orchestra, led by Levine Andrade and conducted by Robert Ziegler. Andy Gill, reviewing the album for the Independent, heard only “the merest fragment of swirling strings”.

Alexis Petridis in the Guardian thought the piano ballad had become a rock default since “Karma Police”, one Radiohead had set by accident, and that this one should have sounded tired and did not. What saved it, to his ear, was the brass and strings weaving in and out instead of cushioning the song the way an orchestra usually does.

into the water

The lyric is a short invitation to jump into clean, still water where nobody else is around. Will Hermes in Rolling Stone took it as a wash in clean water in a dirty world. Dolan, in the same magazine a month later, could not tell whether it was a drowning or a swimming lesson, and was happy not to know.

It opens the album's last three songs, with “Give Up the Ghost” and “Separator” after it. Ryan Leas at Stereogum called the three one of the best stretches in the whole catalogue.

other hands

Illum Sphere's remix went out on the fourth TKOL RMX 12-inch on 15 August 2011. In November Deadmau5, Joel Zimmerman, posted a cover built without a single sample of Radiohead's record and without a voice, the keyboard parts rebuilt note by note over distant horns. He called the song “a personal favorite of mine”.

the piano alone

The band first played it at Maida Vale Studios on 1 July 2011, filming The King of Limbs: Live from the Basement, and on stage it stayed a rarity, twelve nights in all. In Houston on 3 March 2012, a night when at times four people were drumming at once, Yorke played it alone at the piano.

It was in the set at the Arènes de Nîmes on 11 July 2012, the second of two nights there that brought the band back after the stage collapse at Downsview Park in Toronto on 16 June, which killed their drum technician, Scott Johnson.