I Can't

manic hedgehog

It is an On a Friday song. In October 1991 the band recorded a demo at Courtyard Studios, Chris Hufford's place in Oxfordshire. The tape is named after Manic Hedgehog, the Oxford record shop. This song was on it, with early versions of “You” and “Thinking About You”. Later that year Colin Greenwood met EMI's Keith Wozencroft in a record shop and handed him a copy, and on 21 December On a Friday signed a six-album deal with EMI and, at the label's request, became Radiohead.

an older song

When the band made their first session for BBC Radio 1, in June 1992, this was one of the four songs, and one of the two, with “Nothing Touches Me”, that went back to the 1991 demo. It was recorded again for Pablo Honey, where it sits tenth of twelve, though not with the producers of the rest of the album, Sean Slade and Paul Q. Kolderie; the booklet marks it and “Lurgee” as the two produced by Hufford.

The words are an apology that turns into a plea, from someone who has said the wrong thing, blames it on his own doubt, and cannot make himself do better however hard he tries. Annie Zaleski, writing in Salon in 2018, picked out the desperate crooning against raucous bursts of guitar.

out of the set before the album

The archive has it on eight nights, the first dated one at the Jericho Tavern on 31 October 1991. After Leeds on 27 October 1992, at the Duchess of York, it was gone. That same night in Leeds has the first “Lurgee” and the first “Vegetable”, so the album's live set was being put together as this song left it.

remarkably bright creatures

In 2026 it ran through the plot of a film. In Remarkably Bright Creatures, Olivia Newman's Netflix adaptation of Shelby Van Pelt's novel, Lewis Pullman plays Cameron, who calls it the most underrated song on Pablo Honey and then hears it on cassettes left by Erik, the dead son of Sally Field's Tova. Later he plays it on acoustic guitar in a bar, and the film reveals that Erik was Cameron's father.