(Nice Dream)

before the album

It was on stage long before it was on a record. The archive's first performance is the University of Bristol on 10 May 1993, and it was played on eleven nights that year, nearly two years ahead of The Bends.

It started as one of Yorke's: a simple song on four chords. What it became was a group effort, the kind The Bends had more of than Pablo Honey. Jonny Greenwood and Ed O'Brien added parts over the top, the introduction among them.

a single, for a while

EMI wanted a follow-up to “Creep” before anything else, and the early sessions at RAK turned into a hunt for it. John Leckie remembers the band playing him about thirty songs and nobody being able to pick one; in the end, out of frustration, they settled on four to work up as singles, and “(Nice Dream)” was one of them, with “The Bends”, “Sulk” and “Just”. None of them felt right, and the pressure is where the tension of those first weeks came from. It never did come out as a single.

Leckie says he re-recorded it. He told Mix in 2001 that five people play five different acoustic guitars on it. The 2003 page kept Yorke's memory of the day.

We all debuted playing acoustic guitar on this in a sort of cosmic Kumbaya

thom yorke, via this site's 2003 lyrics page

He added that there was an awful photograph of the lot of them sitting on a lawn in headphones.

Greenwood wrote a string part for it; Leckie remembers him writing them for this, “Fake Plastic Trees” and maybe one more. Leckie brought in a cellist he knew from a string quartet, Caroline Lavelle, and Greenwood's friend John Matthias played violin. The album credits them both. The sounds at the very end come off a tape of Arctic recordings that belonged to Leckie. The mix, like most of the album's, is Sean Slade and Paul Q. Kolderie's.

the good angel is out

The song is a daydream of being looked after: people who treat him like a brother, listen to him and dig him a garden of his own. Then he rings a friend, the good angel, and gets her answerphone, and the excuse she leaves is surreal. The last section turns on whether he is strong enough, and whether he belongs.

Yorke said on the 2003 page that the words came out of a half-drunk dream, one of those nights where you never properly sleep.

It's about our relationship with people generally.

thom yorke, via this site's 2003 lyrics page

one hundred and fifty-three nights

By 1995 it was fixed in the set: fifty-two nights that year, and on 28 March Yorke played it alone and acoustic at the Horseshoe Tavern in Toronto, a set the band found on VHS and put out for the album's thirtieth anniversary. Twenty-three nights in 1996, thirty-one in 1997, fifteen in 1998.

Then it went rare. Seven nights in 2000, none with the band in 2002 (Thom Yorke sang it alone at the Bridge School Benefit that October), one in 2003, two in 2004, three in 2009, the last of those at Bramham Park on 29 August 2009. Then 5,912 days of nothing, until it came back at the Movistar Arena in Madrid on 5 November 2025. It was played four times on that tour, the last at the Royal Arena in Copenhagen on 4 December. A hundred and fifty-three nights: it has closed the show five times and never once opened it.