(Nice Dream)

before the album

It reached the stage at the University of Bristol on 10 May 1993 and was played on 11 nights that year, nearly two years ahead of The Bends, and a demo, mostly acoustic with organ and strings, went out on the CD magazine Volume 13.

It started as one of Thom Yorke's, a simple song on four chords. At the end of 1992 he first played it to Ed O'Brien on a tape, just voice and acoustic guitar, sitting in Ed's car, and Ed, in the fan-club booklet, remembers rewinding it about ten times. It became 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 30 songs and nobody being able to pick one. In the end, out of frustration, they settled on four to work up as singles, “(Nice Dream)” with “The Bends”, “Sulk” and “Just”, and none of them felt right.

Leckie says he re-recorded it, and told Mix in 2001 that five people play five different acoustic guitars on it. Yorke, on this site's 2003 lyrics page, remembered an awful photograph of the lot of them sitting on a lawn in headphones.

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

thom yorke, via this site's 2003 lyrics page

Jonny 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 Jonny's friend John Matthias played violin. The whale-like sounds at the very end come off a tape of Arctic recordings that belonged to Leckie, which Colin Greenwood pointed out in the band's fan-club booklet. 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, by 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 the nights when he never properly slept.

It's about our relationship with people generally.

thom yorke, via this site's 2003 lyrics page

sixteen years away

By 1995 it was fixed in the set, and that August NME tipped it as the band's next A-side; the next single was “Street Spirit (Fade Out)”. It stayed through the OK Computer tour and thinned out after it. In 2002, when the band left it alone, Yorke played it by himself at Neil Young's Bridge School Benefit in California, third in an eight-song set.

After Bramham Park on 29 August 2009 it was gone for 5,912 days. It came back at the Movistar Arena in Madrid on 5 November 2025, the night the band sang “Happy Birthday” to Jonny on his 54th. In 156 nights it has closed the show five times and never once opened it.

the wedding

In “The Wedding”, the sixth episode of the FX series Love Story, shown in March 2026, John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette dance to it in a church lit only by candles. TVLine reported that a Prince song was played at the real reception. Jen Malone, the show's music supervisor, chose the feeling over the facts, and she knew it was a sad song, she said, about happiness that does not last.