In Limbo

lost at sea

It turns up early in Ed O'Brien's online studio diary under its first name, “Lost at Sea”, and in July 1999 he was pleased with it, in the unpunctuated way the diary was written.

after only nine months work its starting to sound like its getting somewhere

ed o'brien · radiohead.com diary, 22 july 1999

They took it up again on 3 August. Thom Yorke thought they had already made the definitive version in Paris earlier that year, though he admitted that came down to how he had sung it, and the only place he had sung it that way was alone in his car with a tape running. O'Brien preferred the new take for its relentlessness. The next day the band hardly played at all and talked instead, and O'Brien wrote that Radiohead themselves were in limbo, with nothing to get ready for but “an album”. By the end of March 2000 Melody Maker was listing “Lost At Sea/In Limbo” among the songs in contention for the record.

arles, for the tapers

It was one of seven new songs at the Théâtre Antique in Arles on 13 June 2000, the band's first full concert since December 1998. Before it Yorke told the crowd that all the new songs would be on the internet the next day anyway, and afterwards he gave its name for anyone taping, so they would get the title right. Within three days the whole show was on Napster.

They played it 34 times that year, and then it thinned out. After the Velodrom in Berlin on 13 November 2003 it was gone for 1,742 days, came back at the White River Amphitheatre in Auburn on 20 August 2008, and has not been heard since Tokyo on 8 October 2008.

trapdoors

It opens on three sea areas from the BBC Shipping Forecast, Lundy, Fastnet and the Irish Sea. The 2003 lyric on this page mishears that first line as “I'm the first in the Irish Sea”. Freeden Oeur in PopMatters noted that it is the only song on the record to name real places. After them come a message that cannot be read, trapdoors, a spiral downwards and a repeated accusation of living in a fantasy world. The lyrics were not printed on the sleeve. Select asked Yorke in December 2000 whether “In Limbo”, “Optimistic” and “Idioteque” had been shaped by atrocious world events, and he said that was the reason he had been blocked for two years, because he could not write about such things and do them justice. To Nick Kent, a few months later, he said the words on Kid A were left empty on purpose, to make room for the music.

built to throw the listener

Kent, interviewing Yorke for Mojo, put it to him that “In Limbo” and “Knives Out” had tricky riffs, odd time signatures and strange chords, and asked whether the point was to throw the listener. More or less, Yorke said.

Jonny Greenwood's part is clean, staccato and arpeggiated, a late-'70s Fender Starcaster through a Boss SD1 and a Roland RE-201 Space Echo into a Vox AC30, and on the record the loose jam at the end of “Optimistic” turns into it. Brent DiCrescenzo in Pitchfork heard the ending flare up and suck Yorke into nothing, and under it Freeden Oeur, in PopMatters, found Yorke's own voice, distorted, drowning out his live one.

Later in the same interview Yorke picked it out as one of the Kid A songs he still stood by, for the disorientating, floaty feel they had managed to catch.