Karma Police

the joke that came first

The title came off the road. On the tour behind The Bends it was a band catchphrase. In Jonny Greenwood's memory, “whenever someone was behaving in a particularly shitty way, we'd say ‘The karma police will catch up with him sooner or later.’” It was Ed O'Brien who suggested they make a song of it.

Thom Yorke kept the phrase and wrote a threat around it. He said the song was about stress, about “having people looking at you in that certain [malicious] way”, and both he and Jonny were careful to say it was funny and not to be taken entirely seriously.

It's for someone who has to work for a large company. This is a song against bosses. Fuck the middle management!

thom yorke · the independent, 15 september 2006

a key that will not settle

Acoustic guitar and piano carry it, and the key keeps moving. The verse can be read in A, natural minor or dorian, or in E minor sliding into E phrygian, the chorus sits in G major, and the coda will go either way between B minor and D major. The piano figure is close enough to “Sexy Sadie” that the comparison has followed the song.

Two verses and a subdued break come round twice, and then the song drops the pattern for the section built on “For a minute there, I lost myself”. The last minute is O'Brien driving a delay into self-oscillation and then lowering the delay rate, so the sound melts. Yorke told Nigel Godrich he hated the ending as it stood, and the two of them rebuilt it out of loops and samples. Godrich remembered it as the first time they had done anything like that, a forerunner of a lot that was to come, good and bad.

fridge buzz

The man who “buzzes like a fridge” and is “like a detuned radio” is background noise made into a person, the fridge buzz Yorke kept coming back to across OK Computer. The closing line was picked up rather than written; Yorke said he probably heard it on television. By 2023 he found it ironic that people had spent years writing about his lyrics as if they were some deep, heartfelt thing.

It's like collage. It's just walking down the street and experiencing something and thinking, ‘What would that be like if I stuck that in your face?’

thom yorke · financial times, 30 august 2023

released

It came out in Britain on 25 August 1997 as the second single from OK Computer, on two CDs and a 12-inch, and reached number eight. American modern rock radio got it on 13 October, and five months later it peaked at 14 on Billboard's Modern Rock Tracks. It went to number one in Iceland, and in March 2010, nearly 13 years late, it turned up at 15 on the Danish singles chart. Early versions surfaced in 2019 on the hacked minidiscs the band put out as MiniDiscs [Hacked].

the field kept singing

It reached the stage ten months before the record, on the American tour supporting Alanis Morissette in the summer of 1996. The first night was at Great Woods in Mansfield on 14 August, and on that tour Yorke sang the chorus line an octave higher than he would on the album. It became a closer, and 69 nights have now ended with it.

At Glastonbury on 28 June 2003, six years to the day after their 1997 headline set there, it ended the first encore. When Yorke walked off, the field carried on singing the closing line by itself in the silence. Two months later at Red Rocks Yorke had started to leave after it, then thought better of it, came back to the microphone grinning and led the amphitheatre through it with no band at all.

the car and the running man

Jonathan Glazer directed the video, having already made “Street Spirit (Fade Out)”. It is shot from the driver's seat of a car chasing a man down a dark road, with Yorke in the back. The man falls, the car reverses, a trail of leaking fuel shows up in the headlights, and the man lights it with a book of matches; Yorke vanishes and the car burns.

Glazer had pitched the idea to Marilyn Manson first, who wanted something closer to Lost Highway and turned it down, and the commissioner Dilly Gent passed it to Radiohead. The running man was the Hungarian actor Lajos Kovács, who cramped so badly during the running shots that he needed injections in his leg to keep going, and burnt his thumb raw lighting matches behind his back, take after take.

At the 1998 MTV Video Music Awards it was up for Best Direction, and for three other prizes, and won none of them; Madonna's “Ray of Light” took the direction award. In 2001, Glazer said he had set out to make something hypnotic from a single point of view, and still thought he had missed.

It was very hard to achieve and I feel that I didn't achieve it.

jonathan glazer · indiewire, 12 june 2001