Codex

piano, flugelhorn, strings

“Codex” is where The King of Limbs stops clattering. Yorke is at the piano, its chords smeared by a flanger, with a Roland TR-808 ticking underneath. Two flugelhorn players, Noel Langley and Yazz Ahmed, play on it (the same pair are on “Bloom”), and the strings are the London Telefilmonic Orchestra, led by Levine Andrade and conducted by Robert Ziegler. They are mixed a long way back. Andy Gill in the Independent heard barely a scrap of them; Jon Dolan in Rolling Stone heard the beat as a very depressed EKG machine.

Mark Pytlik at Pitchfork heard “Pyramid Song” behind it, and Jordan Blum at Consequence reached for the same comparison ten years on. Alexis Petridis in the Guardian went further back, to “Karma Police” and the piano ballad as a rock default that Radiohead had accidentally set.

It should sound hackneyed, but it doesn't.

alexis petridis · the guardian, 24 february 2011

He thought the brass and strings did the opposite of what an orchestra usually does on a ballad, weaving in and out instead of cushioning.

into the water

The lyric is a short invitation to jump into clean, still water where nobody else is around. The critics read it for themselves: Will Hermes in Rolling Stone read it as washing yourself clean in a dirty world, and Dolan, in the same magazine a month later, left it open between a drowning and a swimming lesson and was happy not to know.

the second half

It starts the album's last three songs, with “Give Up the Ghost” and “Separator” after it, and that run has a following of its own. Ryan Leas at Stereogum called the three songs one of the best stretches in the whole catalogue, and passed on Chris DeVille's line that “Codex” and “Give Up the Ghost” were the dark night of the soul with “Separator” as the sunrise.

The Illum Sphere remix went out on the fourth TKOL RMX 12-inch on 15 August 2011, and Illum Sphere was one of the DJs at the remix album's launch night at Corsica Studios in London on 11 October.

twelve nights

It was the rare one on stage. The archive's first “Codex” is 1 July 2011 at Maida Vale Studios, where the band filmed The King of Limbs: Live from the Basement, and it counts twelve nights in all: four in 2011, eight in 2012. It was left out from the second Roseland night in New York on 29 September 2011 until the tour opened in Miami on 27 February 2012.

The last one was at the Arènes de Nîmes on 11 July 2012. That was the band's first show after the stage collapse at Downsview Park in Toronto on 16 June, which killed their drum technician Scott Johnson, and the night they paid tribute to him and their crew. They have not played “Codex” since.