Present Tense

a soundcheck, then noon at latitude

It first surfaced at a Radiohead soundcheck in 2008. The next summer, on 19 July 2009, Yorke opened the main stage at the Latitude festival in Henham Park, near Southwold, at twelve noon: an hour on his own, moving between acoustic guitar, a keyboard set to sound like a harpsichord, a grand piano and a drum machine. He said he took the slot because it was a nuts idea. Somewhere in the set he fingerpicked 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 Tomorrow's Modern Boxes in 2014. On 4 December 2015 he played a reworked version at Le Trianon in Paris, at the Pathway to Paris benefit during the UN climate conference, the same night he aired “Silent Spring” and “Desert Island Disk”. Daniel Kreps, in Rolling Stone, took that 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”. Will Hermes in Rolling Stone singled out the high choral voices on it and on “Decks Dark”; Nina Corcoran in Consequence, noting how sparse it had been in 2009, heard the rhythm open out into echoes and choir. Lanre Bakare, putting the album in the Guardian's best of 2016, measured the same distance, from Yorke's rough guitar sketch to a “beautifully wrought, bossa nova-tinged ballad”. Jamie Milton in DIY liked how it built from Yorke's guitar into something spiralling and still wanted rid of the “over-tinkering echo” on the backing guitars.

dancing as self-defence

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 short refrain between is about being lost in someone.

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.

on stage

The first full-band performance was the tour opener in Amsterdam on 20 May 2016. The archive counts 45 nights: 20 in 2016, six in 2017, nine in 2018 and ten in 2025. After the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia on 31 July 2018 it was gone for 2,654 days, and came back at the Movistar Arena in Madrid on 5 November 2025. The last so far is the Royal Arena in Copenhagen on 16 December 2025. It has never opened or closed a show.