Little by Little

junkyard percussion

It came out of the same process as the rest of The King of Limbs, parts played, sampled, looped and cut up in Jonny Greenwood's software, with the song built on whatever the loops suggested. Here the loops are mostly percussion, clattering enough that Jon Dolan, reviewing the album for Rolling Stone, heard the drum circle as pencils banging on bedsprings. Will Hermes, also in Rolling Stone, called it junkyard gamelan, backward loops over a steady bass pulse with a melody that had an Arabic cast to it, and thought a line of Thom Yorke's about being a tease sounded oddly lonely, like someone singing into a phone camera turned on himself. To Mark Pytlik at Pitchfork the guitar shapes crumbled and the whole song sounded run-down on purpose, with Phil Selway's odd time signatures pushed to the front.

Robert Christgau gave the album a two-star honourable mention in his Consumer Guide, found it more fun than anything Brian Eno was making at the time, and named two tracks worth hearing, this one and “Bloom”.

first in the remix series

When the band handed the album to remixers, this was the first song out. Caribou's remix led the first TKOL RMX 12-inch on 4 July 2011, backed with Jacques Greene's “Lotus Flower”, and reached number three on the UK physical singles chart. Shed's version followed on the fourth single on 15 August. Caribou, Dan Snaith, went on to support Radiohead on the British leg of the 2012 tour.

second song, then the middle

It was fourth in the surprise Glastonbury set on 24 June 2011, the first time it was played, and it is on the Live from the Basement film. Reviewing the first Roseland night in New York that September, Consequence heard real funk in it and in “Staircase”, with Yorke's Atoms for Peace still hanging over both.

When the 2012 tour reached Tampa on 29 February it was the second song of the night, and it stayed near the top through most of the American spring. From San Jose in April it moved to the middle of the set, and the archive has it on twenty-six nights, the latest in Bologna on 25 September 2012.