Like Spinning Plates

the tape turned round

It started as another song. The band tried “I Will” with synthesiser arrangements and later dismissed the results as “dodgy Kraftwerk”. Then 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 his voice would run forwards over a backing running the wrong way. Colin Greenwood, in an account the 2003 site kept on its lyric page, set it beside something he had heard on the radio. In Copenhagen, he said, he had heard on BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour about an English composer, whose name he could not remember, who wrote a vocal line phrased backwards for a singer to perform forwards. Colin called it “kind of my favourite track”. “I Will” itself waited until Hail to the Thief in 2003, in a different arrangement altogether.

the best of the new

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

Yorke had no doubts about where it stood 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

Alexis Petridis, in The Guardian, called this track and “Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors” self-indulgent. The site's readers sided with Yorke, and in the January 2003 poll for their favourite Amnesiac song gave it nearly twice the votes “Pulk/Pull” got. Johnny Hardstaff's animated film ran the two together anyway.

the piano ballad

On stage it became a piano ballad. Its busiest year was 2003, with 20 nights, and Yorke introduced it at Earls Court that November with a phrase lifted from its own chorus. He played it on his own as well, at Neil Young's Bridge School Benefit in 2002, and on his solo tour of 2019, alone at a keyboard; in Portland it was the last song of the night, after he had compared Donald Trump with Boris Johnson. Christopher O'Riley put the piano version on Hold Me to This, his second record of Radiohead songs for solo piano, in 2005.

After Boston on 29 July 2018 the band did not play it for 2,676 days. It came back in the encore on the band's last night at the O2 in London on 25 November 2025, its first outing of the tour, to disbelief from fans posting from the arena, and the latest of its 69 nights is Copenhagen on 5 December 2025.

first time out

The piano version was there from its very first night. At the Blossom Music Center in Cuyahoga Falls, outside Cleveland, on 8 August 2001, Radiohead opened the first encore with it in front of a sold-out amphitheatre of nearly 15,000, the first time the song had been played anywhere. That performance was taped, and the band picked it for I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings that November, so the version on the record is the first time they ever played it. Twenty years later Kid A Mnesia laid the same piano figure over the reversed studio track.