Life in a Glasshouse

an old song

It was older than the sessions it finished. An early demo of Yorke playing it alone on acoustic guitar surfaced in 2019 on MiniDiscs [Hacked], the band's release of their OK Computer-era minidiscs. By the Kid A sessions they still could not finish it.

dear mr lyttelton

So Jonny Greenwood wrote a letter. Its recipient was Humphrey Lyttelton, the trad-jazz trumpeter and bandleader, then well into his seventies. The letter was polite to the point of cringing.

we're sure you're very busy, but we're a bit stuck

jonny greenwood's letter, quoted in q, april 2001

Lyttelton had never heard the band. He borrowed OK Computer from his daughter, met Greenwood, and brought his usual group to a studio in Bayswater. What they made there was a New Orleans jazz funeral. Nick Kent reported in Mojo that a horn-playing friend of Lyttelton's had been let out of hospital, after open-heart surgery, the day before.

What Lyttelton described to Q was a long, uncertain day: nobody knowing what anybody would do, Yorke vanishing to sit cross-legged in what looked like meditation, and seven hours of playing. By the end his lip was in a ragged state and he turned down the offer to carry on after food. He heard the track as starting in a bluesy, ad-libbed minor key and turning into wild, primitive New Orleans blues, and he thought Yorke's words were surreal in the way “A Whiter Shade of Pale” is, only better.

they went through quite a few nervous breakdowns

humphrey lyttelton · q, april 2001

papered windows

Yorke told Kent where it came from. He had read an interview with the wife of a very famous actor whom the tabloids had hounded for three months. She collected the papers with her picture in them and stuck them over every window of the house, so the photographers camped on her lawn could only photograph their own work. From there the song became, in Yorke's words to Kent, a rant about tabloid journalism destroying people at will.

one night on television

It closes Amnesiac. A longer take, 5:06 against the album's 4:34, went out as a “full length version” on the “Knives Out” single in August 2001.

The archive has it live exactly once: at the BBC on 9 June 2001, taped for Later... with Jools Holland with the Humphrey Lyttelton Band, in a session the 2003 site logged at 21 songs. A month later, on 7 July 2001, Lyttelton was on the bill at South Park in Oxford for the band's homecoming, in front of about 42,000 people, and the archive does not have the song that day.

The 2003 site's readers liked it more than that suggests. In the January 2003 poll for favourite Amnesiac song it got 33 votes, level with “Knives Out”.

the tribute

Lyttelton died on 25 April 2008. Greenwood posted on the band's site that he had been an inspiring person to record with, and that without his direction the song would never have been recorded or released. Chris DeVille at Stereogum called the closer's build a “magnificently wobbly climax” in 2021. Ten years earlier, for Stereogum's cover of every Amnesiac track, it went to the USC Trombone Choir.