Desert Island Disk

le trianon

Thom Yorke first played it at Le Trianon in Paris on 4 December 2015, on the first of two Pathway to Paris benefit nights there, held while the UN climate conference went on across the city. Patti Smith was on the bill and Flea joined Yorke for a couple of songs. Yorke had two new ones that night, “Silent Spring”, which became “The Numbers”, and this, and a setlist taped to the stage gave their titles. They were his first new songs since Tomorrow's Modern Boxes the year before. Five months later it was track four on A Moon Shaped Pool.

the acoustic one

On a record full of strings and choir, it is led by fingerpicked acoustic guitar. Nina Corcoran in Consequence thought it could easily have stayed a solo piece, and that the electronic whirr and light drumming around the guitar were what made it a band song; she heard Nick Drake's “Hazey Jane I” in it.

The words follow a man going on his way, out through an open doorway and across a street into another life, catching his reflection in a lit window and not knowing it. He talks of waking from a shutdown that has lasted a thousand years, and the closing refrain insists that love comes in more than one kind. Yorke and Rachel Owen had announced their separation in August 2015, after 23 years together, four months before he first sang it.

On 27 May 2016 Radiohead put up Adam Buxton's short film for it on Instagram, one of the vignettes different artists made for the album. The camera moves slowly over flowers, and then the picture stops to buffer.

second song

The first full-band performance was the tour opener at the Heineken Music Hall in Amsterdam on 20 May 2016, fourth in the run of the album's first five tracks played in order, and at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles that August Yorke switched to acoustic guitar for it. From Mexico City in October it moved up a place, and through 2017 it came second every night it was played, straight after “Daydreaming”.

In Argentina and Brazil in April 2018 it dropped to the back half of the set. For the North American summer it was second again, and the 2025 tour left it out.

one disk

The title bends Desert Island Discs, the BBC programme Roy Plomley started in 1942, where a guest picks eight recordings, a book and a luxury to be marooned with. Radiohead's has a k and is singular, and the programme's name is nowhere in the words.