Jigsaw Falling into Place

open pick

The band played an early version on the 2006 tour, listed on the setlist as “Open Pick”, from the first night at KB Hallen in Copenhagen on 6 May, 17 months before anyone could hear the record. It came out of the same run of sessions as “Bodysnatchers”. Mike Diver, reviewing the single for Drowned in Sound, heard a pop-rock song for nodding along to, driven by the bass, which is about right.

the helmets

Garth Jennings and Adam Buxton made the video for Thumbs Down, the band's webcast from Oxford, where it was first shown on 9 November 2007. It was done in two takes, the band playing in their own studio, each with a camera strapped to a bicycle helmet, so the film is five points of view on one performance. David Byrne, who happened to be visiting, watched the finished video and assumed the helmets would be edited out. Buxton had kept them in on purpose.

For me, that was the point. It's funny… [Radiohead] completely got what was good about the idea.

adam buxton · gq, 3 september 2020

He reckons it is the least popular video the band ever released, and rates it among his own best work.

the single, and sixteen years off

It was the first single from In Rainbows, out on 14 January 2008, and reached number 30 in the UK. The B-sides were Thom Yorke's solo From the Basement performances of “Videotape”, “Down Is the New Up” and “Last Flowers”. Steve Reich later built part of Radio Rewrite out of it and “Everything in Its Right Place”, calling it “a beautiful song” with “elaborate harmonic movement”.

In 2008 it was in the set 46 times. After 2009 the band went 16 years without playing it, until it came back in Madrid on 5 November 2025, the second night of that year's tour.

before you're comatose

Yorke told NME it was a set of observations rather than his own story, much of it from the years he lived in the centre of Oxford and went out now and then into the chaos of a weekend.

The lyrics are quite caustic, the idea of ‘before you're comatose’ or whatever, drinking yourself into oblivion and getting fucked-up to forget… [There] is partly this elation. But there's a much darker side.

thom yorke · nme, 8 december 2007

Two days after the single came out, the band played In Rainbows in order at a free show at 93 Feet East on Brick Lane, moved there that afternoon from the record shop next door. Introducing this one, Yorke said it had been a strange day and he might need a drink afterwards: “I'm trying to cut down, but today seems a bad day to cut down.”