Fitter Happier

ten minutes upstairs

Thom Yorke had been stuck. He told Humo he had three months of writer's block in which all he could produce was lists of words, and it took him a while to see that the lists were the way out. The lists came out of a pile of self-improvement books he had bought, which the band tried to use in different ways. At St Catherine's Court, the house outside Bath where they were recording, he went upstairs while the others were playing and wrote this one, he told Select, in ten minutes.

Nigel Godrich was working in the library downstairs. Up in the house Stanley Donwood, who made the band's artwork, had been typing short stories into the Macintosh, having Fred read them aloud and sending the recordings to his dad, which everyone found hilarious. Then Yorke came down and played them what he had done.

Fuck. That's perfect.

nigel godrich · rolling stone, 16 june 2017

fred

Fred is one of the synthesised voices that came with the Macintosh's SimpleText, running here on a Macintosh LC II, and he puts the stresses in the wrong places. Ed O'Brien, quoted on the 2003 version of this site, thought that was the point, since a computer stumbling over the words keeps them neutral, where Yorke reading them himself would have sounded pretentious. Yorke called handing the words over liberating. Plenty of listeners took the voice for Stephen Hawking's.

Around it is a small collage. The piano is Yorke's, off a Dictaphone recording made at home; O'Brien remembered it as a late-night take in the rehearsal room, played drunk, which is audible in the playing. Jonny Greenwood scored strings to fit it, Godrich supplied electronic noises from his own experiments, and Yorke added a loop of dialogue from Three Days of the Condor that he had taped off the television.

a checklist

It is a list of 1990s aspiration, the gym and the diet and the better working relationships, and it frays as it goes on. Yorke described the words as a checklist of slogans for the decade, and told Melody Maker it was the most upsetting thing he had ever written.

The last image, a pig in a cage on antibiotics, came from a book. Q named it as Jonathan Coe's What a Carve Up!, and Yorke told Rolling Stone it was the first time he had read about what farmers feed the animals people eat. He has also said he no longer stands behind the lyric, and listens to the piano part instead.

the campaign

The band thought about opening the album with it and decided it was too off-putting, so it sits seventh, between “Karma Police” and “Electioneering”. Parlophone made it the face of the record anyway, with full-page advertisements in British newspapers and posters in tube stations, and the same slogans on T-shirts. Yorke said the choice tied the artwork and the promotion to one set of concerns.

the tape they walked on to

The archive has no night on which anybody performed it. On the 1997 tour it was the tape the band walked on to, and at the Zeleste in Barcelona on 22 May, the first of two nights for which EMI had flown in its international staff and the press, it did its job almost too well. Once Fred had finished and the band were on stage, the clapping and chanting went on so wildly for a couple of minutes that Ted Kessler, reviewing for NME, wondered whether the gig would have to stop. Yorke then sang “Lucky” into a wall of photographers' flashes.

other lives

Menny More recorded it in 2006 for the Easy Star All-Stars' Radiodread, with the words lightly reworked, by Radiohead's leave, to suit the style.

Stephen Petronio's Ride the Beast, made for Scottish Ballet and the Edinburgh International Festival in August 2007, is set to five Radiohead songs, and it opens on Fred.