House of Cards

mellow and summery

Thom Yorke gave it its first airing alone on acoustic guitar, in an unannounced set at Methodist Central Hall in Westminster on 15 April 2005, during Wake Up to Trade Justice, an all-night protest about the rules of world trade. A fan recorded part of it in the hall, and within days the recording was going round online, poor sound, missing ending and all.

An early band version had, Colin Greenwood said, a bassline in the style of R.E.M. Jonny Greenwood wanted it to sound like an Iggy Pop song, and later admitted that “would probably have killed something beautiful and tender”. In the end Yorke and Phil Selway rebuilt it around the rhythm that is on the record. Yorke's own description was “mellow and summery”, and the comparison he reached for was Fleetwood Mac's “Albatross”.

The words are unusually direct about infidelity, with the 1970s key party right there in the first line, and Rolling Stone called it “surprisingly sexy”.

the man who quit kyoto

It was one of the new songs on the 2006 tour, first played in Copenhagen on 6 May. At the Blackpool opening of the British dates a week later it went down better than any of the other new songs and drew a short clap-along, and at the Hammersmith Apollo the next week the crowd clapped along again.

In April 2008, rather than fly to New York for one song on Late Night with Conan O'Brien, the band filmed it in a London studio and sent the tape to NBC; Drowned In Sound reported that they reckoned the trip would have put out as much carbon as a year of driving. When it went out on 23 April, Yorke dedicated the refrain to “that twat who walked away from the Kyoto agreement”. He named nobody, but it was George W. Bush who had said in March 2001 that the United States would not implement the Kyoto Protocol.

Its busiest year on stage was 2008, with 39 nights. After Melbourne on 16 November 2012 it went unplayed for four years, until Atlanta on 1 April 2017, and Philadelphia on 1 August 2018 is the latest of its 83 nights.

no cameras

It went to American modern rock radio as a promo on 6 April 2008 and was nominated for three Grammys. James Frost directed the video with motion capture from Geometric Informatics for the close work and a Velodyne lidar, 64 lasers spinning on one head, for the big outdoor scenes. Nothing in it was filmed. Yorke's face is a moving cloud of measured points, and the party scenes are scanned rooms. Yorke sat in front of a laser in the dark, then emailed back and forth with Frost for a whole month while the director sat at the computers with the technicians who processed the data, and Yorke was struck by “how strangely emotional it ended up being”. Frost's point was that everything around us is data now, and that we lean on it so hard our lives already seem digital.

Then the band gave the data away. The raw scan data went up on Google Code under a Creative Commons licence, with Processing code by Aaron Koblin, so that anyone could build a video of their own out of Yorke's face.