Song · In Rainbows era (2007–09)
Faust Arp
Two minutes and nine seconds, and by Yorke's account the most rewritten lyric on the record.
In Rainbowsalbum- 2007released
- 2:09length
2007
pages and pages
Yorke carries notebooks everywhere. Jonny Greenwood told Mojo he is always filling them, and Yorke admitted to the same magazine that about 95 per cent of what goes into them is never used. Talking to Mark Paytress about how he writes, he brought up Neil Young, who says he never goes back to a lyric because it only gets worse, and said that frightened him. This song was his counter-example: page after page of lines, until eventually the good ones stuck.
Faust Arp is the exact opposite of that, pages and pages
thom yorke · mojo, february 2008
2007
two guitars and strings
What survived the notebooks sits on fingerpicked acoustic guitar and a string arrangement by Jonny Greenwood. Mark Pytlik in Pitchfork called the strings syrupy and heard the Beatles' sweetest two-minute interludes in it. Spin's Lane Brown heard Yorke souring a folk-pop idyll with bad news. Writing for Rolling Stone, David Ehrlich called it a 130-second song too often written off as filler between “All I Need” and “Reckoner”, heard lyrics about taxidermy and resentment, and credited Greenwood's guitar as the secret ingredient that lets Yorke get away with them.
the title
faust, not goethe
Radiohead named it for Faust, the German band behind The Faust Tapes and Faust IV; Alexis Petridis, interviewing their former bassist Jean-Hervé Peron and his old bandmates for the Guardian in 2021, listed Radiohead among Faust's admirers and pointed to this title as their tribute.
The other Faust got the attention in 2007. Readers of the Observer Music Monthly sent in the theory that In Rainbows was built on Goethe, pointing at the Mephistopheles line in “Videotape”. Yorke told Craig McLean he vaguely knew the story and had not taken it off the shelf, and that he would have to look it up.
that sounds suitably pretentious. We live in Oxford, after all.
thom yorke · observer music monthly, 9 december 2007
2007–2017
on stage
The archive has it on 53 nights, starting at the band's own studio in Oxford on 8 November 2007, the month they webcast Thumbs Down from there. It was a 2008 song: 47 of the 53 are that year, then four in 2009 and one in 2010, in Los Angeles at the Music Box at the Fonda on 24 January. After that it went 2,765 days without a performance, until the Sferisterio in Macerata on 20 August 2017. It has opened the night once.
the video
The official promo, from Scotch Mist.· Radioheadwatch on youtube →
takes(3)
Live history
| Times played | 53 shows |
|---|---|
| Live debut | Thursday 8 November 2007 · Oxford |
| Last played | Sunday 24 January 2010 · Los Angeles |
Nights played include broadcasts; opened and closed count gigs only. A cancelled night has no setlist. All setlist stats →
sources7
- Mark Paytress, “Chasing Rainbows”, Mojo, February 2008, for the notebooks, Neil Young and Greenwood's strings.
- Mark Pytlik, “Radiohead: In Rainbows”, Pitchfork, 15 October 2007.
- Lane Brown, “Radiohead, Inc.”, Spin, December 2007.
- David Ehrlich, “Radiohead: 20 Insanely Great Songs Only Hardcore Fans Know”, Rolling Stone.
- Alexis Petridis, “Krautrock legends Faust: ‘We were naked and stoned a lot – and we ate dog food’”, The Guardian, 18 October 2021, for the tribute in the title.
- Craig McLean, Observer Music Monthly, 9 December 2007, for the Goethe theory.
- Wikipedia, “In Rainbows”, for the Thumbs Down webcast.