Paranoid Android

three songs, one track

It began as salvage. Radiohead had fragments that would not grow into songs on their own, and the way out was the shape of “Happiness Is a Warm Gun”, where the parts are fused and the joins show. “Bohemian Rhapsody” and the Pixies were in the room too, and the band knew exactly how absurd the result was.

We felt like irresponsible schoolboys… Nobody does a six-and-a-half-minute song with all these changes. It's ridiculous.

colin greenwood · exit music, 2000

The title came from Marvin, the depressed robot in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Thom Yorke told the Canadian entertainment site Jam! in 1997 that it was a joke about how he was being read, as the miserable one, which suited people fine; the rest of the song, he said, is not personal at all.

fourteen minutes at st catherine's court

They recorded it with Nigel Godrich at St Catherine's Court, near Bath. The first version ran past 14 minutes and ended in a long Hammond organ solo from Jonny Greenwood. Ed O'Brien said they would crack up laughing while they played it and bring out the glockenspiel. Yorke called that version a Pink Floyd cover, and Jonny said the organ was “hard to listen to without clutching the sofa for support”.

Taking the editing of Magical Mystery Tour as their model, they cut it to six and a half minutes and replaced the organ with a short guitar solo. Yorke shouted gibberish into a Dictaphone for the ending, and Godrich spliced the pieces together on 24-track tape, enormously pleased with himself.

I sort of stood there and said, ‘You guys have no idea what I've just done.’ It was pretty clever.

nigel godrich · rolling stone, 16 june 2017

The long version escaped anyway, on the minidiscs that leaked in 2019, and on the evidence there the scissors were right.

four sections, 6:23

The opening is in G minor, acoustic guitar and shaken percussion with the electric guitar and voice over the top. Two minutes in, the second section moves to A minor at the same tempo with a different rhythm, and ends on Jonny's distorted solo, his tone run through a Mutronics Mutator.

The third section is Jonny's own, something he told Guitar World he had had floating around for a while, which happened to be in the right key and at the right speed. The tempo drops from 82 to 62, the harmony turns into a looped progression like a Baroque passacaglia, split between C minor and D minor, and the vocals are multi-tracked into a choir. Dai Griffiths, in his book on OK Computer, noted that the chords would ordinarily sound seedy, like Portishead. Then the second section comes back as a coda, and the song ends the way that section did.

a bar in los angeles

Yorke wrote the lyrics after a night in a Los Angeles bar full of strangers high on cocaine. A woman turned violent when a drink was spilled on her, and there was a look in her eyes he had never seen anywhere before; he could not sleep afterwards. She became the “kicking squealing Gucci little piggy” of the second section. He described the song as three moods written in three different states of mind, and said the sneer about an opinion of no consequence at all points the other way; it is his own opinion he means.

the least likely single

Capitol, the band's American label, backed the choice of a six-minute song with no chorus as the lead single, and the band wanted it first because it told people what the album was going to be. Colin Greenwood said it was “hardly the radio-friendly, breakthrough, buzz bin unit shifter” the stations had been expecting.

Radio 1's Evening Session gave it its first play in April, nearly a month early. It came out on 26 May 1997 and reached number three, still Radiohead's highest place on the British chart. As it caught on Radio 1 played it up to 12 times a day, and Yorke later named that as one of his proudest moments of those years. In Australia it got to number 29.

The B-sides were “Polyethylene (Parts 1 & 2)” and “Pearly” on the first CD, “A Reminder” and “Melatonin” on the second, and OK Computer's “Let Down” on the Japanese release. Stanley Donwood and Yorke made the artwork, credited to “dumb computers”, a hand-drawn dome carrying the song's last line, with the pig and the handshake from the album sleeve, both borrowed from Pink Floyd covers.

robin, benjamin and the mermaids

After the video for “Street Spirit” people expected something moody and dark, and the band wanted the opposite. They went to the Swedish animator Magnus Carlsson, whose series Robin they loved. Carlsson had been angling to do “No Surprises” and had no idea what to do with this one, so he locked himself in his office for more than 12 hours with the song on repeat, staring out of the window and writing down images. The band kept the lyrics from him so the film would not illustrate them.

Robin and his friend Benjamin move through a world of miserable EU delegates, bullying drinkers, a prostitute, kissing leathermen, mermaids and an angel who plays table tennis. The band turn up in a bar, badly drawn on purpose, because Colin thought them performing in it would be too Spinal Tap. MTV put it in heavy rotation in America and cut the mermaids' breasts out, and a later American version dressed them in bathing suits. MTV Europe ran it uncut for two weeks because the censor was off sick.

We would've understood if they had a problem with some guy chopping his arms and legs off, but I mean, a woman's breasts! And mermaids as well!

colin greenwood · exit music, 2000

first heard at the zodiac

Its earliest known performance was at the Zodiac in Oxford on 2 July 1996, almost a year before the single, at a show nobody had announced. About 400 people got in, around half of them on the guest list. Yorke took requests from the crowd and scoffed at anyone who asked for “Creep”, which the band did not play, and Jonny played with his arm in a brace. From the stage Yorke apologised to his home town in advance.

If you see me in the centre of Oxford and I'm not very nice to you, I'm sorry.

thom yorke · the zodiac, oxford, 2 july 1996

In 1997 it was played 78 times. The archive has it on 468 nights, and 35 of them ended with it.

the anime

NME made it Single of the Week and likened it to “Bohemian Rhapsody” played backwards by Vietnam veterans on crack. It was nominated for Best British Single at the 1998 Brit Awards. In 2006 the Japanese anime Ergo Proxy asked to use it over its end credits; the band said no, then watched a preview and said yes.