Song · A Moon Shaped Pool era (2015–21)
Decks Dark
Third every night it was played in 2016, it then sat out the whole of the following year.
A Moon Shaped Poolalbum- 2016released
- 4:41length
2014–16
tape, then a choir
Radiohead started A Moon Shaped Pool with Nigel Godrich in their Oxfordshire studio in September 2014, and Godrich kept the computers out, so everything went to analogue multitrack tape. Colin Greenwood said later that working like Motown on eight tracks made them settle things on the spot. They spent three weeks at La Fabrique in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in 2015, and recorded the strings at RAK in London.
The singers are loudest on this one. The album credits the London Contemporary Orchestra, conducted by Hugh Brunt, for strings and a women's chorus, all arranged by Jonny Greenwood, and here the voices sit high above the band on the refrain. Alexis Petridis in the Guardian heard Pink Floyd's Atom Heart Mother in them, and reckoned they would make anyone still set on casting Radiohead as a latter-day Pink Floyd prick up their ears. When Jon D'Auria sat down with Colin for Bass Magazine in 2019, D'Auria picked out the bass here, with “Identikit” and “Burn the Witch”, as the places on the record where Colin lets a line run.
2016–18
three guitars
It was first played at the Heineken Music Hall in Amsterdam on 20 May 2016, Radiohead's first concert since November 2012, where they opened with the album's first five tracks in order. That year it came third, straight after “Daydreaming”, on all nineteen nights it was played. At the second of two nights at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles on 8 August, with no orchestra on stage to fill in for the record's strings, Thom Yorke, Jonny and Ed O'Brien each played a separate electric guitar line through it, and Steve Hochman of buzzbands.la heard the three pulling against each other and locking together at once.
When it came back after its year off, at the United Center in Chicago on 6 July 2018, it had lost its place, and that summer it turned up anywhere from seventh to 18th.
the words
the dark arrives
It is science fiction. A darkness arrives, a craft parks across the sky, there is nowhere to hide, and running to the back of the room with hands over ears does not help. Then the middle section waves the whole thing off as a joke, several times, and the pictures sink into the ground, a head made of wet sand, grass growing over the singer. The last lines forget the spaceship and turn to someone who is about to leave. Yorke and Rachel Owen had announced in August 2015 that they had separated after 23 years, and reviewers read the album against that.
The helpless rag-doll people of the first verse turn up again four tracks later, in “Identikit”, as a mankind made out of rag-doll parts.
on stage
Thom Yorke without the band, at Zermatt Unplugged, 2022.· karindgrwatch on youtube →
the record(1)
on stage(6)
Live history
| Times played | 28 shows · 1 of them Thom Yorke solo show |
|---|---|
| Live debut | Friday 20 May 2016 · Amsterdam |
| Last played | by Thom Yorke, solo, Saturday 9 April 2022 · Zermatt |
| Last by Radiohead | Wednesday 1 August 2018 · Philadelphia |
Thom Yorke, solo 9 April 2022 Zermatt
Nights played include broadcasts; opened and closed count gigs only. A cancelled night has no setlist. Thom Yorke’s solo nights are counted and marked as his; the openers, closers, longest absence and chart are Radiohead’s own. All setlist stats →
sources8
- Alexis Petridis, review of A Moon Shaped Pool, The Guardian, 8 May 2016, for Atom Heart Mother.
- Jon D'Auria, “Colin Greenwood: How to Disappear Completely”, Bass Magazine, 29 March 2019, for the bass and the tape sessions.
- Daniel Kreps, “Watch Radiohead Debut ‘Moon Shaped Pool’ Songs in Amsterdam”, Rolling Stone, 20 May 2016, for the opening five.
- Steve Hochman, review of the Shrine Auditorium, buzzbands.la, 9 August 2016, for the three guitars.
- A Moon Shaped Pool album credits (XL Recordings, 2016), for the London Contemporary Orchestra, the women's chorus and Hugh Brunt.
- Wikipedia, “A Moon Shaped Pool”, for the recording dates and studios.
- Wikipedia, “Rachel Owen”, for the separation.
- Performance dates and running orders from this site's own setlist archive.