Just

a freezing cold farm

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. Yorke's description of what his guitarist was doing: 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. Greenwood 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 about seven minutes. Yorke thought it the most exciting thing they had recorded to that point.

Greenwood plays octatonic scales spread over four octaves, and in the solo runs the guitar through a DigiTech Whammy to shift it up into a squeal. The words are about somebody in a bad relationship, sung with what one writer called a malicious vibrato.

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: everyone asks why he is lying there and he will not say. Eventually he tells them, and his answer is the one line in the film that is not subtitled. 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 art direction follows The Conformist, and Thraves cast the lead for his resemblance to Jean-Louis Trintignant. Dorian Lough, who had to trip over the body take after take, came away with a spiral fracture.

Though Radiohead were relatively unknown at the time, everyone involved knew they were working with a groundbreaking band. We all knew there was magic.

jamie thraves · rolling stone, 13 march 2020

Nobody has ever said what the man says, and people have been guessing since 1995.

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: 48 in 2006, and 31 when it was reissued as a single from Version in 2008.