Present Tense

noon at latitude

It first surfaced at a Radiohead soundcheck in 2008. The next summer, on 19 July 2009, Thom Yorke opened the last day of the Latitude festival in Henham Park, near Southwold, at twelve noon, an hour on his own on the main stage, moving between acoustic guitar, a keyboard set to sound like a harpsichord, a grand piano and a drum machine and looping himself as he went. He said he took the slot because it was a nuts idea. Halfway through he sat down with the acoustic guitar to fingerpick a new one called “The Present Tense”, and gave the crowd leave to wander off.

This is a new song, so you know – go for a piss.

thom yorke · nme, 19 july 2009

the long way round

For six years it stayed his. He played it now and then at solo shows and with Atoms for Peace, and left it off his 2014 solo album Tomorrow's Modern Boxes. In 2012, when Uncut readers asked Jonny Greenwood about the songs the band had never finished, it was one of the two he wanted them to come back to. On 4 December 2015 Yorke played a reworked version at Le Trianon in Paris, at the Pathway to Paris benefit during the UN climate conference, and Daniel Kreps, in Rolling Stone, took the changes as a sign the band had gone back to it.

bossa nova

On A Moon Shaped Pool the definite article is gone and the fingerpicked sketch is a bossa nova. Jon Pareles in the New York Times heard it as bittersweet and filed it with “Knives Out” and “House of Cards”, and Will Hermes in Rolling Stone singled out the high choral voices on it. When Lanre Bakare put the album in the Guardian's best of 2016, he measured how far it had come, from a rough sketch on Yorke's guitar to a finely made ballad.

The opening lines make dancing a weapon, used in self-defence against the present tense of the title. The singer promises to keep it light and keep moving while his world falls in around him, and to keep going in case all this love turns out to have been wasted.

the band version

The first full-band performance was the tour opener in Amsterdam on 20 May 2016, and it stayed in the set through 2018. Its longest silence ran seven years, from Philadelphia on 31 July 2018 to Madrid on 5 November 2025, and on the 2025 tour it was played on ten nights. On the last of four nights at the O2 Arena in London on 25 November it came in a seven-song encore, just before “Like Spinning Plates” returned for the first time in seven years.

tarzana and the mercury

Paul Thomas Anderson filmed Yorke and Jonny Greenwood playing it in Tarzana, California, just the two of them and a Roland CR-78 drum machine, and Radiohead put it out on 15 September 2016. It was also their entry at the Mercury Prize ceremony that night; the band did not go, so the film stood in for a live performance. Skepta won.