Like Spinning Plates

the tape turned round

It started as another song. The band tried “I Will” with synthesiser arrangements, and Yorke later dismissed the results as “dodgy Kraftwerk”. They turned the tape round, and Yorke, listening from the next room, liked what the melody did backwards.

That's miles better than the right way round

thom yorke · the wire, july 2001

He spent the rest of that night learning to sing along to the reversed music, so that when the whole thing was flipped back his voice would run forwards through a backing that was still running the wrong way. Colin Greenwood's version, kept on the 2003 site's lyric page, has him hearing about the trick on BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour in Copenhagen: an English composer, whose name he could not remember, had written a vocal part phrased backwards for a singer to perform forwards. Colin called it his favourite track.

“I Will” itself turned up in 2003 on Hail to the Thief, in a different arrangement.

what it sounds like

Simon Reynolds in The Wire heard Robert Wyatt's Rock Bottom brought up to date for the IDM era. Canada's Jam!, in a note the 2003 site kept, heard machine-gun clicks, scratching like a turntable and backwards guitar, with Yorke's voice warped like the dwarf in Twin Peaks. The words are about a balancing act that is failing, and about being fed pleasant speeches while it fails.

Yorke ranked it first among the album's attempts at something new.

trying to get somewhere new, I think Spinning Plates is the best

thom yorke · mojo, june 2001

Not everyone agreed. Alexis Petridis in The Guardian liked the album and found this track and “Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors” self-indulgent. The site's own readers sided with Yorke: in the January 2003 poll for favourite Amnesiac song it got 30 votes, to 16 for “Pulk/Pull”.

whales and a centrifuge

Johnny Hardstaff made one computer-animated film for it and “Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors” together, with killer whales under ultraviolet light, machinery forming shapes and conjoined babies in a centrifuge. It premiered at the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow on 29 November 2001. MTV restricted its airplay as being of a sensitive nature, and Hardstaff took a swipe at the channel's taste in return.

the piano version

On stage they rebuilt it as a piano ballad. It first appears in the archive at Blossom Music Center outside Cleveland on 8 August 2001, and the piano version went onto I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings that November. A take from the “Why Us?” sessions, running 5:04, came out on Kid A Mnesia in 2021.

Its big year was 2003, with 21 nights. The desk had it back for the year in Edinburgh on 21 May, in the encore at Oberhausen on 10 November and in the set at Cardiff on 24 November. At Earls Court that week Yorke introduced it with a phrase lifted from its own chorus, and it opened the second encore at The Point in Dublin on 3 December. On 8 December he and Jonny Greenwood played it for Radio 1 at Maida Vale.

After TD Garden in Boston on 29 July 2018 it was gone for 2,676 days. It came back as an encore on the last of four nights at the O2 in London on 25 November 2025, its first outing of the tour, and was played again at the Royal Arena in Copenhagen on 5 December. That makes 70 nights. Yorke had also played it alone at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta on 6 October 2019, on his solo tour.

other hands

Christopher O'Riley put it on Hold Me to This, his second album of Radiohead songs for solo piano, released on Harmonia Mundi on 12 April 2005; Pitchfork felt the melody came out too heavy in his chords. In November 2003 the Boston duo Odd Appetite played it for cello, tuned water glasses and a whirled blue tube at a Boston Modern Orchestra Project night. O'Riley's version also stood for the song in Stereogum's cover of every Amnesiac track in 2011.