Ful Stop

full stop, with two l's

David Fricke of Rolling Stone was at the American Airlines Arena in Miami in February 2012 for the band's last rehearsal before the tour, for which they had worked up more than 75 songs. Colin Greenwood wanted to talk about a new one called “Full Stop”, still spelled that way, and the moment in it where Thom Yorke's voice jumps into falsetto.

The song just takes off.

colin greenwood · rolling stone, 26 april 2012

It reached an audience at the First Midwest Bank Amphitheatre in Tinley Park, outside Chicago, on 10 June 2012. Curt Baran of the Illinois Entertainer thought it already sounded finished; Yorke, as it ended, told the crowd “It'll get better with age”. It was played ten times that year, and it and “Identikit”, another new song from that tour, both turned up on A Moon Shaped Pool four years later.

two drummers

Clive Deamer, who had played the second kit on those 2012 nights, is on the record too, the only track on the album he plays on. Nina Corcoran in Consequence heard a menacing bass line with Phil Selway and Deamer hammering away beside it, and a malevolent synthesiser runs underneath. Jonny Greenwood's guitar sits on top in phasing arpeggios, and when Guardian readers asked him in 2018 for a favourite guitar part, he named these.

Ful Stop has good phasing arpeggios which are really satisfying.

jonny greenwood · the guardian, 14 march 2018

Jon Pareles counted it in the New York Times among the album's few fast songs, and said its steady beat carried nerves rather than pleasure. Jamie Milton in DIY called it the centrepiece of the album, three minutes of deranged build breaking into something euphoric, and wished the record had more like it.

foul medicine

It is an accusation. Someone has ruined everything, and the singer asks why he should behave when they will not; the cure he is being offered tastes vile, and he is stuck inside their full stop. After the falsetto lift the high voices keep repeating what the truth will do, and the last lines ask, over and over, to be taken back.

coachella

On most nights in 2016 it closed the opening run of the album's first five tracks, played in order. In 2017 it came third every night, and that is where it was at Coachella in Indio on 14 April 2017 when the sound failed. Colin, stuck at the back between two drum kits and unable to hear the PA, heard a crash in his ears, and then the stage manager walked on and asked them to leave the stage; Colin thought a plane had come down. Yorke blamed the software or hardware of their own mixing desk.

After Philadelphia on 1 August 2018 it was away seven years. It came back at the Movistar Arena in Madrid on 4 November 2025, the first night of the 2025 tour, and was played on fifteen nights of that tour.