Song · Hail to the Thief era (2003–04)
Go to Sleep
A folk riff in restless bars, ending with Jonny Greenwood's guitar chopped to pieces by a patch he wrote himself.
Hail to the Thiefalbum- 2003released
- 3:21length
2002
little man being erased
The full title is “Go to Sleep. (Little Man Being Erased.)”, and for a while the subtitle was a candidate for the whole album, alongside The Boney King of Nowhere and Snakes and Ladders. None of them won, and all three ended up as second titles for songs, in the manner of the Victorian music-hall playbills that had given the band the idea.
It starts as an acoustic guitar riff that Colin Greenwood compared to English folk music of the 1960s. The metre will not sit still: the first part alternates bars of 4/4 and 12/8, so the strum keeps flipping between counting in twos and in threes. Brad Osborn used it as an example in a 2010 paper on grooves in math rock.
The album's Wikipedia article hears the giant of Gulliver's Travels somewhere in the words. They end on a refusal: the singer who meant to sleep through it all decides he will not.
2002–03
the stutter
The sound that jumps across the song, and takes over at the end, is Jonny Greenwood's guitar run through Max, the programming language he had been using to manipulate the band's playing, set to cut the signal up at random. The album credits him with guitar, laptop and toy piano on it.
The effect has been chased ever since. In February 2017 the founder of the gear site The King of Gear put a pedal called the Feral Glitch on Kickstarter at $260, with random and fixed stutter modes, built to get a guitarist near that patch without a laptop.
18 aug 2003
the single
It came out on 18 August 2003 as the second single from Hail to the Thief, on two CDs and a 12-inch. Music Week's release list for that Monday put it alongside Girls Aloud's “Life Got Cold” and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club's “Stop”. The B-sides were “I Am Citizen Insane”, a live “Fog (Again)”, “Gagging Order” and “I Am a Wicked Child”; Capitol put out the American CD on 3 September.
It reached 12 in Britain, 10 in Scotland, 11 in Ireland and Denmark, 9 in Italy, 39 in Australia and 2 in Canada, and 2 on the UK rock chart. Twenty years later Angie Martoccio of Rolling Stone asked whether it made sense as a single and answered herself: not really. Her explanation was the label's.
EMI was trying to retrench Radiohead as a big rock band
angie martoccio · rolling stone, 9 june 2023
2003
the video
Alex Rutterford, who had made the video for Autechre's “Gantz Graf” the year before, directed it entirely in CGI. Yorke sits in a park while people in business suits hurry past him, and the classical buildings around the square fall to pieces and put themselves back together as modern blocks.
2002–2012
on stage
It was first played at the Coliseu dos Recreios in Lisbon on 23 July 2002, which the 2003 version of this site recorded at the time, and it was a fixture of 2003 with 64 nights. A live recording from Osaka, remixed by Jonny Greenwood, went on sale through warchildmusic.com on 9 September 2004 as a 99p download for War Child.
After Rod Laver Arena in Melbourne on 26 April 2004 it disappeared for 2,958 days, and came back for two nights in June 2012: Newark on 1 June and Washington on 3 June. The archive has 75 nights in all.
It is on Hail to the Thief (Live Recordings 2003–2009) in 2025, where Pitchfork's Molly Mary O'Brien heard it speed up and end in a Greenwood guitar solo she called “delightfully pixelated”.
the video
The promo, directed by Alex Rutterford.· Radioheadwatch on youtube →
takes(2)
Live history
| Times played | 75 shows |
|---|---|
| Live debut | Tuesday 23 July 2002 · Lisbon |
| Last played | Sunday 3 June 2012 · Washington |
| Longest absence | 8 years · back on Friday 1 June 2012 · Newark |
Nights played include broadcasts; opened and closed count gigs only. A cancelled night has no setlist. All setlist stats →
sources9
- Wikipedia, “Go to Sleep”, for the metre (citing Brad Osborn, “Beats that Commute: Algebraic and Kinesthetic Models for Math-Rock Grooves”, Gamut 3, 2010), the video, the track listings and chart placings.
- Wikipedia, “Hail to the Thief”, for the alternative titles (citing Michael Odell, Q, July 2003, and Xfm, 2 July 2003), Colin Greenwood's folk comparison (citing the Parlophone interview CD, 22 April 2003), Max and the Gulliver's Travels reading, and the album credits.
- Michael Astley-Brown, “Recreate Jonny Greenwood's randomised stutter effect with new Feral Glitch pedal”, MusicRadar, 22 February 2017.
- “New Releases: Singles”, Music Week, 16 August 2003, for the release date and the week's other singles.
- Angie Martoccio, “Twenty years later, Radiohead's Hail to the Thief has never sounded better”, Rolling Stone, 9 June 2023.
- Wikipedia, “Alex Rutterford”, for “Gantz Graf”.
- “Radiohead release new song for War Child”, Music-News.com, for the Osaka download.
- Molly Mary O'Brien, review of Hail to the Thief (Live Recordings 2003–2009), Pitchfork, 15 August 2025.
- The 2003 site's lyric page for the premiere, and the site's live archive for every date and count.