Give Up the Ghost

cambridge and the big chill

A year before the album, Thom Yorke played a solo benefit at the Corn Exchange in Cambridge on 25 February 2010 for Tony Juniper, who was standing for Parliament for the Green Party. When he announced it he said he did not normally get involved in politics, and then that it was hardly going to be Labour or the Tories, was it.

The student paper Varsity sent two reviewers, and they picked out this song, which they called “Giving Up the Ghost”, as the standout. He built it in front of them on a sample pedal, looping a beat and his own harmonies over and over until it rose to a huge crash. At the Big Chill that August he played it again on his own, and introduced it as a new Radiohead song.

the record

On The King of Limbs it follows “Codex”. The core is an acoustic guitar played slowly, and the Rolling Stone review noticed Jonny Greenwood knocking on its body as a drum. Under it runs a loop of Yorke singing a two-word plea not to be hurt; over it he sings the verses, at one point announcing he has had enough, and more Yorkes pile up behind him in falsetto. Chris DeVille at Stereogum, ten years on, likened it to an open-mic night's loop-pedal turn at its very best, and meant it kindly.

Two remixes came out on the TKOL RMX 12-inches in August 2011, Thriller's “Houseghost” on the fourth and Brokenchord's on the fifth.

the room coming back

The archive's first full-band night is the surprise set on the Park stage at Glastonbury on 24 June 2011. By the two Roseland Ballroom nights in New York that September it had turned into something else. Greenwood sampled Yorke's live vocal and fed it back, and because the microphone was also picking up the hall, every pass brought more of the room with it.

It's getting the room back, again and again and again.

thom yorke · rolling stone, 26 april 2012

Yorke was already wondering what that would do in an arena, and in 2012 he found out, on fifty-three nights. Some nights it was just the two of them. At the Ziggo Dome in Amsterdam that October, Yorke and Greenwood opened the first encore alone with it before the others came back for “Supercollider”.

the laugh track

At the Hearst Greek Theatre in Berkeley on 18 April 2017, “Give Up the Ghost” opened the first encore, and partway through, Yorke's loop pedal appeared to jam and he and Greenwood missed a turn near the end. Yorke swore into the microphone. Eight and a half thousand people laughed, the band carried on without stopping, and the next loop took the laughter and played it back over and over, like a studio audience. Rolling Stone Italia told it slightly differently, with Greenwood catching Yorke's swearing in his sampler on purpose and sending it back out until Yorke was laughing too.