Identikit

three loops

It was left over from The King of Limbs. The band had been working with loops, and Thom Yorke recorded three of himself singing; Colin Greenwood told Bass Magazine that at that point it was more sketch than song. Colin took the loops home to his Akai MPC and played with them until he was, in his word, obsessed with the melodies. He sent ideas to Yorke, Yorke sent them back with piano on top, and that exchange became the bridge after the last verse.

wonky hip-hop

David Fricke of Rolling Stone watched the last rehearsal before the tour, in the American Airlines Arena in Miami on 26 February 2012, and “Identikit” was one of two new songs run through that night, with “Cut a Hole”. Yorke told him it had wormed its way to the head of the class.

joyful, slow but with a wonky hip-hop beat

thom yorke · rolling stone, 26 april 2012

He also said it felt odd to rehearse songs that had no finished recording, because the recording is where the decisions get made. The next night in Miami it was played to an audience for the first time, Yorke and Ed O'Brien singing two drowsy lines against each other over an unsettled beat, and it stayed in the set all year.

It did not always start cleanly. At the Sprint Center in Kansas City on 11 March, on what Yorke told the crowd had been a very random day for the band, with a Westboro Baptist Church picket outside, Clive Deamer, the tour's second drummer, came in wrong. They stopped, Yorke introduced Deamer to the audience, and they started again.

a p-bass in france

In France, working with Nigel Godrich at La Fabrique, Colin wrote his part on his old Precision bass, which has a slight fuzz in the low end. The chord sequence was so plain, he said, that he over-harmonised it a little.

The record is not the song they had toured. Nina Corcoran in Consequence found the 2012 performances stuttering next to the studio take, which adds a groove breakdown and dreamlike backing vocals, and Will Hermes in Rolling Stone compared it to the downtempo B-side of a 1982 post-punk 12-inch, with Yorke's voice split into several.

a ragdoll mankind

The verses are about sweet-faced people with nothing inside who are easy to love, and a mankind put together from ragdoll parts; then Yorke refuses, over and over, to know when someone is messing him around. Jon Pareles in the New York Times heard the Beatles in the chorus and wondered whether the title meant the police Identi-Kit, the system for building a face out of interchangeable parts.

back for the record

After Rod Laver Arena in Melbourne on 16 November 2012 it was gone until the first night of the 2016 tour, in Amsterdam on 20 May, with the record just out. Yorgos Lanthimos made one of the album's short films for it, a single one-minute take of Denis Lavant in a café eating a sandwich that is not there. In 2017 it usually came straight after “Bloom”.

the nashville session

Somewhere on the 2012 tour the band went into Jack White's Third Man studio in Nashville and recorded two songs, this one among them. Asked on Reddit the following February what had come of it, Yorke said they now had two unfinished tracks, “one of which is identikit”. Nothing from the session was released. Ed O'Brien told Matt Everitt on BBC Radio 6 Music in 2016 that it had been fun, and that White recorded everything on eight-track.

Listen, it's not worth waiting for.

ed o'brien · nme, 9 october 2016