Just

a freezing cold farm

Thom Yorke said it was written “on a freezing cold farm” in 1994, while the band were worried they would be remembered for nothing but “Creep”. Most of it is Jonny Greenwood's, and Yorke said he “was trying to get as many chords as he could into a song”.

The riff is lifted, more or less openly, from John McGeoch's playing on Magazine's “Shot by Both Sides”, a song Radiohead have also covered, and Jonny has said it is “pretty much the same kind of idea”. John Leckie, who produced this, had produced that too.

rak

It was the first song they finished at RAK for The Bends, and one of three that EMI had marked as a potential single, which is part of why those early sessions were tense. Ed O'Brien remembered early versions running to about seven minutes. Yorke thought it the most exciting thing they had recorded to that point.

Jonny's scales climb over four octaves, and for the solo he runs the guitar through a DigiTech Whammy and shifts it up into a squeal. The words are about somebody in a bad relationship; the 2003 site heard a narcissistic friend Yorke had to get away from.

the man lying down

Jamie Thraves directed the video, reworking an idea he had for a short film. A man lies down on the pavement. People stop, the band watch from a flat above, and the conversation appears in subtitles as everyone asks why he is lying there and he will not say. Eventually he tells them, and his answer is left without subtitles. Then the bystanders lie down beside him.

It took two days, shot around Liverpool Street and on a set for the band's part. The actor Dorian Lough had to trip over the man on the pavement 30 or 40 times and hurt his wrist so badly that he thinks it was a spiral fracture; twenty years on it still troubled him. The art direction follows The Conformist, and Thraves cast the lead for his resemblance to Jean-Louis Trintignant. Thraves has said he will probably take the answer to his grave.

to tell you would deaden the impact, and would probably make you want to lie down in the road too.

jamie thraves · quoted on the 2003 site

released

Parlophone put it out on 21 August 1995 and it reached number 19. It went onto Radiohead: The Best Of in 2008. Mark Ronson's brass-heavy cover, recorded for the tribute album Exit Music, charted twice on its own, at 48 in 2006 and at 31 when it came out again as a single from Version in 2008.

back in madrid

It was first played at the Royal Berks Hospital Social Club in Reading on 21 February 1994, a night that also gave “Fake Plastic Trees” and “My Iron Lung” their first airing, and in 1995 the band played it 99 times. After Reading Festival on 30 August 2009 it went unplayed for 16 years.

It came back at the Movistar Arena in Madrid on 7 November 2025, the third of four nights there, second to last before “Karma Police”. It had been pencilled onto the written setlist two nights earlier as the alternative to “Planet Telex”, and left off. This time the band told the crowd they did not know whether people remembered this one, and the crowd sang it back to them, guitar riff and all.