Lotus Flower

moon upon a stick

Thom Yorke tried it out alone first. At the Echoplex in Los Angeles on 2 October 2009, the warm-up show for the band that became Atoms for Peace, he played it on guitar after the Eraser set and said it was a song he might do with the band. Two nights later at the Orpheum he admitted he did not know what it was called yet, and offered “Moon Upon a Stick” as a possibility.

On 24 January 2010 Radiohead broke off work on The King of Limbs to play a benefit at the Music Box in Hollywood for Oxfam's response to the Haiti earthquake, and Yorke played it there on his own. That night went online free that December as Radiohead for Haiti, and it is where the archive's count of the song begins.

claps in five

It has a plainer shape than most of the album, which is probably why it ended up out front; Mark Pytlik at Pitchfork guessed it was picked for having a chorus and not being a ballad. Yorke sings in falsetto over a driving synthesiser bassline and syncopated beats. The song is in four and the handclaps are in five, so the claps and the beat keep sliding past each other, a pattern the music theorist Brad Osborn later picked apart.

the dance

The album arrived a day early, and with it a black-and-white film by Garth Jennings of Yorke in a bowler hat, dancing, choreographed by Wayne McGregor. Within days people were cutting it to other soundtracks, “Surfin' Bird” and Beyoncé among them, and by 2013 it had passed 20 million views and become the “Dancing Thom Yorke” meme. McGregor, who choreographed for the Royal Ballet, told Time Out he honestly thought Yorke an incredible dancer. Phil Selway, talking to Drowned in Sound at Liverpool SoundCity in May, said the dancing was good, and added that in Yorke's shoes he would have done the birdie dance.

It's a massive kick. That's what everybody wants. If it's something you've worked at and it goes over the edge like that then that's great.

thom yorke · dazed, 12 february 2013

It never went on sale as a single, but it still reached 165 on the UK chart, 52 on Japan's Hot 100 and 33 on Billboard's Alternative Airplay. It was nominated for three Grammys, Best Rock Performance, Best Rock Song and Best Music Video.

maracas

On Saturday Night Live that September Yorke sang it shaking a pair of maracas, dancing as he went. Four nights later, at the first of two shows at the Roseland Ballroom in New York, he told the crowd the video had made him realise he had become “an embarrassing dad”.

On stage it shared the opening slot with “Bloom” and got it far more often in the last months of 2012, and it has opened twenty-two nights in all. After Melbourne on 17 November 2012 it was away until Amsterdam on 20 May 2016, and the archive has it on 115 nights.

the hat

In November 2020 Radiohead put a bowler hat of Yorke's up on eBay, signed, with the money going to testicular cancer awareness, and by the end of the first day the bidding had passed £4,700.