Cuttooth

a bass riff and nothing else

Ed O'Brien's studio diary first mentions it on 3 August 1999, as a new song, long and hypnotic, with something of Neu! about it. By the end of the month it still had almost no structure, and the one fixed thing in it was a bass riff. He wondered how Neu! made their 12-minute epics sound so spontaneous, and whether it had taken hard rehearsal or editing. On 3 September the band spent nearly a whole rehearsal giving it markers to stand in for a verse and a chorus, and it got better.

In December he came into the studio to find Phil Selway on drums and Thom Yorke on Rhodes going through it.

it's one of those moments when you hear something being played and all you want to do is pick up a guitar and join in.

ed o'brien · studio diary, 7 december 1999

It is three chords, he added, so not too taxing. The next day he wrote that the song needs stamina.

eight and a half minutes

Back from a week off on 21 February 2000, the band set up and recorded it because Nigel Godrich wanted to get on with mixing. They did five or six takes, and by the end it ran to eight and a half minutes. Two days later Graham, the new engineer, cut the master tape and spliced in a piece from another take, Colin Greenwood added a driving bass part and Yorke did a synth pass. Jonny Greenwood put feedback and backwards guitar on it the day after.

They kept adding. O'Brien knew the danger, that a song like this will take endless embellishment and lose what was good about it, and at five in the morning, in his entry for 25 February, with the overdubs not yet cut back, he thought it sounded overcooked. Godrich, he noted the following Monday, had been sidetracked by it the week before.

the b-side

It was lined up for Amnesiac at one stage, and went instead on the first CD of the “Knives Out” single in 2001. The released version runs 5:25, three minutes shorter than the eight and a half minutes it reached that first day.