Exit Music (For a Film)

the commission

Baz Luhrmann sent Radiohead the last half-hour of his Romeo + Juliet in 1996, while they were touring America with Alanis Morissette, as Ed O'Brien remembered it. Thom Yorke told Humo they started on it the moment they saw Claire Danes put the Colt .45 to her head.

He tried working Shakespeare's lines into it and gave up. What he wrote instead tells the story from a distance, and it goes back to a film he saw as a boy.

I saw the Zeffirelli version when I was 13 and I cried my eyes out, because I couldn't understand why, the morning after they shagged, they didn't just run away. It's a song for two people who should run away before all the bad stuff starts.

thom yorke · select, july 1997

The title means the music over the closing credits, and the lovers' exit as well.

a stone staircase

They recorded it at St Catherine's Court, the house near Bath where they made most of OK Computer, and the reverb on the vocal is the building itself, since Yorke sang it on a stone staircase. He compared the opening, one voice and an acoustic guitar, to Johnny Cash's At Folsom Prison. A Mellotron choir and other artificial voices come in underneath, and then the drums and a bass through a fuzz pedal arrive and flatten everything. That climax was an attempt at Portishead, and in Colin Greenwood's words it came out “stilted and leaden and mechanical”. Yorke told Mojo it was the first recording they had made in which every note made his head spin, one he could turn up loud without wincing once.

Luhrmann was in the final mix by then, past the point where new music could go in, and had another song over the credits. Yorke's went over them all the same.

Suddenly this guy runs into the studio in London, where we were recording, with a tape that said ‘From Thom, to Baz, I hope I'm not late’.

baz luhrmann · abc, 7 june 2018

kept off the soundtrack

It is not on the Romeo + Juliet soundtrack album. The band held it back for OK Computer, which came out in Britain on 16 June 1997. The Cinematic Orchestra, the Easy Star All-Stars, Vampire Weekend and Kelly Clarkson have all covered it.

out of tune at wembley

Yorke and Jonny Greenwood played it first, without the band, at the Tramshed in London on 10 October 1996, eight months before the album, ending a six-song set with it at a party for the magazine Dazed & Confused's 25th issue. On the 1997 tour Yorke began it alone, and the band came in behind him.

At Wembley Arena on 16 November 1997, the only night there on that tour, he was standing on his own with an acoustic guitar and a green light passing over him when he realised in the first verse that he was out of tune. He stopped, retuned and carried on, and at the end he walked away from the microphone laughing. John Robinson saw it for NME.

It has closed eleven shows, a run of them on the 2000 tour. After Philadelphia on 1 August 2018 it was away for seven years, and it came back in Madrid on 5 November 2025.

the grammys

OK Computer was up for a Grammy, and Radiohead pulled out of playing the ceremony in New York. “They said we weren't good for the ratings, so we said OK,” Yorke told Triple J in Australia. The band had toyed with playing this song and walking off. The Academy asked them to present an award to someone else instead, which they turned down, and the album won Best Alternative Music Performance on 25 February without them.