Kid A

kiddae

Yorke does not remember writing it. He told Select that the name came from his sequencer, which had filed the song's opening melodies under it, and that one day he simply found the file. He was working on something like fifty things at once that year, with another hundred sitting in the sequencer, which drove the others mad and made him happy. Jake Kennedy in Record Collector was told it began around a computer program and was then jammed over.

It was finished early. On 23 November 1999, with Nigel Godrich mixing, O'Brien's diary counted six songs mixed and one worth keeping:

only one is right - kid a.

ed o'brien · radiohead.com diary, 23 november 1999

the voice taken apart

It is the second track, 4:44, and the one that told anyone who had got past “Everything in Its Right Place” that the old Radiohead were not coming back. Brent DiCrescenzo's Pitchfork review opened on skittering toy boxes, heard Warp Records in it and called it a vocoder lullaby. Simon Reynolds in Spin heard Yorke's wordless vocal melted down like something out of Dalí. Kennedy heard a skiffle beat under distinctly artificial singing. The disguise is an ondes Martenot, the early electronic instrument Jonny Greenwood brought to these sessions, and Marc Hogan at Vulture enjoyed the irony of the band's great leap into the future leaning on an instrument from the 1920s.

At 2:53 the voice and the bass drop out, and the drums and synthesisers carry the rest of it upward on their own.

the most vicious

The lyrics were not printed on the sleeve, and Yorke had not even explained them to the band. Andrew Smith of The Observer, on the road with them in Paris, got one line out of him about the title track.

the most vicious I've ever sung

thom yorke · the observer, 1 october 2000

What can be made out is short and strange: a lie, heads on poles and ventriloquists, a figure in the shadows by the bed, and near the end the Pied Piper's exit from Hamelin.

non-meaning

Smith asked whether the title was a nod to Carl Steadman's Kid A in Alphabet Land. It was not.

No. It just seemed to work. I think the best ones are usually like that.

thom yorke · the observer, 1 october 2000

He liked the non-meaning, he said, because a specific title drives a record one way. Of the theories people had brought him, his favourite was that some rogue scientist had already made the first cloned baby, and it was Kid A. The 2003 version of this site was still wondering about the Steadman project on its lyric page, three years after Yorke had said no.

on stage

It first went into the set at the Arènes de Fréjus on 17 June 2000 and turned up only six times that year. It found its place on later tours: 38 nights in 2003, 14 in 2006, 36 in 2012, 12 in 2018. The one night in 2010 was the Oxfam benefit for Haiti at the Music Box in Hollywood on 24 January, where it came straight before “Morning Bell”. After the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia on 1 August 2018 it was gone for 2,665 days, back at the Unipol Arena in Casalecchio di Reno on 17 November 2025. It was still there at the Royal Arena in Copenhagen on 15 December 2025. The archive has it on 126 nights and it has never opened or closed one.

other hands

A 2:53 cover by John Mayer went on the promotional bonus disc of Heavier Things in 2003. The Guardian ranked it 37th of the band's 40 best songs in 2020; Hogan put it at 30.