Myxomatosis

dead rabbits on the road

Myxomatosis is a viral disease of rabbits and hares, usually fatal, which was let loose in Britain and Australia in the 1950s to bring down rabbit numbers that were ruining crops. The 2003 version of this site opened its notes on the song by explaining that.

Thom Yorke had the word from childhood. He told Chuck Klosterman that his parents used to point out the dead rabbits along the road, and that he did not know much about the virus and could not spell it.

I loved the word. I loved the way it sounded.

thom yorke · spin, july 2003

There was no metaphor to dig for, Klosterman decided; Yorke had picked it the way he picked the raindrops in “Sit Down. Stand Up”, for how it sat on tape. The song was already three or four years old, Yorke told David Fricke in June 2003.

a guitar song without guitars

It runs on a driving fuzz bass. The band were after the frightening sound of the detuned synthesisers of 1970s and 1980s new wave bands such as Tubeway Army, and Nick Collins, reviewing the album for Computer Music Journal, filed it among the record's guitar songs that have no guitars in them. A thick synthesiser bass in Gary Numan's manner winds round a swinging drum part, now and then harmonising with the vocal, and drops out for breaks of heavily modulated tones.

judge, jury & executioner

What the song is about, Yorke told Klosterman, is mind control. Someone writes something down, it is edited to suit somebody else's agenda, and afterwards there is no arguing the case, because the edited version is the one that exists. He had been reading Gore Vidal, whom critics dismissed as a conspiracy theorist, and said part of it was wishing that the people who tell you you're crazy were actually right, since that would make life easier.

The lyric follows that route, a story written out neatly and mangled on its way into print, told by a narrator who has caught the disease's symptoms himself. The 2003 site noticed that its lines about being tongue-tied had turned up earlier, in “Cuttooth”.

words on a music stand

It was one of the eight new songs Radiohead opened with at the Coliseu dos Recreios in Lisbon on 22 July 2002, the first night of the try-out run, and Yorke sang it reading the words off a sheet on a music stand, with a small Yamaha keyboard hung round his neck, and joked afterwards that he should have handed out lyric sheets. The next afternoon the night's setlist and the words to “Myxomatosis” turned up under the door of NME's hotel room.

When the band opened their 2003 tour at the Olympia in Dublin, he took the microphone off its stand and scuttled along the front of the stage, and David Cheal of the Daily Telegraph thought of Gollum. At Auckland in November 2012, the month of the American election, Yorke dedicated it to the Republican candidate, Mitt Romney.

It has been played on 180 nights and has never opened or closed one. After Philadelphia on 1 August 2018 it went missing for 2,652 days, and came back in Madrid on 4 November 2025.

the title, twice

Cristian Vogel's remix, retitled “Remyxomatosis”, is on the Com Lag (2plus2isfive) EP, released in Japan and Australia on 24 March 2004. The song's full title adds “(Judge, Jury & Executioner.)”, and in January 2013 Atoms for Peace, Yorke's other band, put out a single called “Judge, Jury and Executioner”. Yorke said it was an accident. He had forgotten he had used the phrase before.