Everything in Its Right Place

after the tour

OK Computer finished Yorke off. He had writer's block, he had stopped believing in rock music, and what he listened to instead was Warp: Aphex Twin, Autechre.

It was refreshing because the music was all structures and had no human voices in it. But I felt just as emotional about it as I'd ever felt about guitar music.

thom yorke · the guardian, 22 september 2000

He bought the house in Cornwall, walked the cliffs, drew, and played the new grand piano. This was the first song that came, before “Pyramid Song”. He called himself a “shit piano player” and took comfort in Tom Waits saying not knowing an instrument is itself a source of ideas.

That's one of the reasons I wanted to get into computers and synths, because I didn't understand how the fuck they worked. I had no idea what ADSR meant.

thom yorke · rolling stone, 14 december 2000

He played the melody over and over, trying, in his words, to meditate his way out of the depression.

sucking a lemon

He has always denied the lyrics are nonsense. They are about the OK Computer tour, and one night in particular at the NEC in Birmingham in 1997.

I came off at the end of that show, sat in the dressing room and couldn't speak… People were saying, ‘You all right?’ I knew people were speaking to me. But I couldn't hear them… I'd just so had enough. And I was bored with saying I'd had enough.

thom yorke · rolling stone, 2 august 2001

The song, he said, is about “trying to fit into the right place and the right box so you can connect”. The lemon is the face he says he wore for three years. He nearly cut the line, and Nigel Godrich told him to keep it.

Pretty silly… I thought it was funny when I sang it. When I listened to it afterwards, it meant something else.

thom yorke, december 2000

piano to prophet-5

Godrich was not impressed at first. The band worked it up as a normal five-piece arrangement in Copenhagen and Paris and got nowhere. In Gloucestershire, Yorke and Godrich moved it off the piano and onto a Prophet-5, and Godrich started feeding the vocal through Pro Tools, scrubbing and re-triggering fragments of it, so the voice that answers Yorke is Yorke.

That solved the song and, by the band's account, solved the album.

We knew it had to be the first song, and everything just followed after it.

jonny greenwood · morning becomes eclectic, 20 october 2000

Greenwood said it was the first time they had been willing to leave something sparse rather than “layering on top of what's a very good song or a very good sound, and hiding it, camouflaging it in case it's not good enough”. O'Brien and Selway, the two with nothing to play on it, said it forced them to accept that not every song needs all five of them.

the door into kid a

It opens Kid A, in an unusual metre and mixed modes, and it announced what the rest of the record was going to do. Plenty of people hated it. Rolling Stone later called it the 24th-best song of the 2000s, “oddness at its most hummable”. A live reinterpretation opened I Might Be Wrong in 2001, and Steve Reich took it apart and rebuilt it as part of Radio Rewrite in 2012.

ninety-five endings

First played in Arles on 13 June 2000, seventy times in 2003, 396 nights in the archive in all, and of those it has closed the show ninety-four times. Only the encore-closers come near.