Ful Stop

a new one in miami

David Fricke of Rolling Stone was backstage at the American Airlines Arena in Miami in February 2012 for the band's last rehearsal before a 58-date tour. They had worked up more than 75 songs for it, some written in rehearsals in Oxford that winter, and Clive Deamer, a second drummer, had been playing with them for a year. Colin Greenwood, 42, wanted to talk about one called “Full Stop”, still spelled that way, and the moment in it where Yorke's voice jumps into falsetto.

The song just takes off.

colin greenwood · rolling stone, 26 april 2012

It reached a stage at the First Midwest Bank Amphitheatre in Tinley Park, outside Chicago, on 10 June 2012, and was played ten times that year. It and “Identikit”, another new song from that tour, both turned up on A Moon Shaped Pool four years later.

two drummers

On the record the credits give Clive Deamer additional drums on this track only, so the double drumming of the 2012 shows survived the studio. Nina Corcoran heard a menacing bass line in Consequence, with Phil Selway and Deamer hammering away beside it. Reviewers heard a malevolent synthesiser underneath, and Jonny Greenwood's guitar sits on top in phasing arpeggios. Asked by Guardian readers 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.

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 to you, and the last lines ask, over and over, to be taken back.

the centrepiece

Jamie Milton in DIY called it the centrepiece of the album: three minutes of deranged build that break into something euphoric, and he wished the record had more like it. Thomas Hannan saw it at the Roundhouse in London on 27 May 2016 and wrote for The Line of Best Fit that it was “the band's best song in many years”.

the one that came back

In 2016 it closed the opening run of the album's first five tracks, played in order, starting in Amsterdam on 20 May. 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; he thought a plane had come down. Yorke blamed the software or hardware of their own mixing desk.

The archive counts 101 nights: ten in 2012, 26 in 2016, 26 in 2017, 24 in 2018. After the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia on 1 August 2018 it went away for 2,652 days, and came back at the Movistar Arena in Madrid on 4 November 2025, one of 15 nights on that tour. The last so far is the Royal Arena in Copenhagen on 16 December 2025. It has never opened or closed a show.