How to Disappear Completely

dublin, and a tidal wave

Thom Yorke began writing it in Toronto in June 1997, in the middle of the OK Computer tour. Later that month the band played the RDS Arena in Dublin, their biggest show to that point, in wind and rain, and that night he dreamed he was running naked down the Liffey with a tidal wave behind him. Ed O'Brien traced the song to that show and to what the touring was doing to Yorke. A week later at Glastonbury the equipment failed and Yorke nearly walked off, until O'Brien talked him into staying.

I just needed a break. And in fact, I didn't get one for another year and a bit, by which point I was pretty much catatonic.

thom yorke · bbc news, 8 june 2017

i'm not here, this isn't happening

Michael Stipe's advice for getting through a tour was to pretend not to be there, and the refrain is that advice. Yorke had the chorus by July 1997, when he told an interviewer in Canada about a song built on it. The idea later went back the other way. Stipe wrote “Disappear” for R.E.M.'s Reveal after hearing the song, then rang Yorke to apologise for taking it, and Yorke reminded him whose idea it had been in the first place.

The title came from Doug Richmond's 1985 manual How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found, a book about erasing one identity and starting another. The song's working titles were “This Is Not Happening” and the book's full title.

old radiohead

Yorke played it acoustic at a New York soundcheck in August 1997, which is in Meeting People Is Easy, and through 1998 the band stretched it on stage to seven and ten minutes. One night Yorke introduced it “for the benefit of the bootleggers”. Melody Maker, reviewing a 1998 performance, thought it sounded like Radiohead covering Unbelievable Truth, the band of his brother Andy.

In early 1999 they recorded it properly at Guillaume Tell in Paris, and Yorke turned the take down. “That sounds great, but it sounds like old Radiohead.” They tried again at Batsford Park on 27 July and then at their own studio at Sutton Courtenay, and along the way the guitars went and the song was handed to strings. In September O'Brien used his online diary to knock down an internet rumour that Godspeed You! Black Emperor were working on it with them; the evidence, he wrote, was a string of coincidences.

strings in an abbey

On 1 December 1999 Phil Selway put drums down for a demo to play to what O'Brien's diary called an orchestral fella. Playing it again felt very strange to O'Brien after all the long versions of it on the OK Computer tour, and he called Yorke's vocal on the demo jaw-dropping.

The next day Jonny Greenwood, the only one of them with formal training, started on the string parts with Nigel Godrich, multi-tracking his ondes Martenot, an instrument he had come to through Messiaen. He took a month over it. The strings were “absolutely his thing”, Yorke told Rolling Stone, with Godrich helping and the rest of the band not involved at all, and Yorke had little more to do with it after the demo, beyond singing it again in January 2000.

On 4 February 2000 they booked three hours at Dorchester Abbey, a 12th-century church five miles from their studio, with the Orchestra of St John's under John Lubbock, chosen because they played Penderecki and Messiaen. When Greenwood gave out the score the players laughed, because by conventional standards it could not be played, and Lubbock told them to try anyway. Greenwood had avoided long notes back to back, so the strings would not sit there like “a row of balloons”, and the orchestra and the ondes Martenot went down together in one take on a handful of microphones and Godrich's Apple G3 computer. The orchestra's concerts director called it more experimental than anything they usually did.

The bare string track came out on its own in 2021, on Kid A Mnesia, as “How to Disappear into Strings”.

the first plain voice

It is the fourth track on Kid A, and the first place on the record where Yorke's voice arrives untreated, after “Everything in Its Right Place”, “Kid A” and “The National Anthem” have each done something to it. Over a strummed acoustic guitar, O'Brien's reverb and delay drift a melody between two chords, and at 5:23 everything converges on one high held note, with the ondes Martenot buried under the strings. Those strings take their shape from Penderecki's Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima, as the ones on “Climbing Up the Walls” had, though the scholar Peter Carney hears more Mingus than Penderecki in the way Greenwood folds atonal fragments into a tonal frame.

The press expected it to be the single, and Kid A had no commercial single. Promotional CDs appeared in Poland and Belgium, and America got it on a double A-side promo with “Idioteque”. NME read the chorus as a plain account of where the OK Computer tour had left Yorke.

the liffey

Radiohead first played it in Los Angeles on 1 April 1998, two and a half years before Kid A, and the archive has it on 188 nights, 20 of them ending with it. Its longest absence ran seven years, until Madrid on 4 November 2025.

It was the last song at the Olympia Theatre in Dublin on 17 May 2003, the first night of the band's run of small halls before Hail to the Thief. When Yorke reached the line about floating down the Liffey, the hall gave it a cheer of its own, six years after the Dublin night the song came from.