Pyramid Song

cornwall, a grand piano

After the OK Computer tour Yorke bought a house in Cornwall and mostly stopped making music. He walked the cliffs and drew, and what playing he did was on a new grand piano. In one week there he wrote this and “Everything in Its Right Place”.

The chords I'm playing involve lots of black notes. You think you're being really clever playing them but they're really simple.

thom yorke · mojo, june 2001

The other song went onto a synthesiser and turned into something else. This one sounded better left alone.

The rhythm came from Charles Mingus: “Freedom”, from the 1962 Complete Town Hall Concert. An early version of the recording even had the handclaps, which Yorke erased because he did not like the sound of them. The words came from an exhibition of ancient Egyptian underworld art he saw while the band were recording in Copenhagen, crossed with cyclical time as Buddhism and Stephen Hawking describe it. “Jumped in the river and what did I see? / Black-eyed angels swam with me” answers “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”; the little row boat to heaven comes from Shirley Ellis's “The Clapping Song”.

the version they lost

Yorke played it alone at the Tibetan Freedom Concert in Amsterdam in June 1999, under the working title “Nothing to Fear”. Then, by Colin Greenwood's account, the band recorded an amazing version onto DAT, could not use it because of the format's limits, and spent a year trying to get back to it.

The basic track they kept was cut in Copenhagen early in the Kid A and Amnesiac sessions, with Yorke's vocal and piano recorded at the same time as Selway's drums. Selway could not find the rhythm and thought the session was falling apart, until he stopped counting and started following the inflections of the piano and the voice, at which point the part arrived.

Jonny Greenwood has used it as his example of the problem with arranging this band's songs: “How do we not make it worse, how do we make it better than Thom just playing it by himself, which is already usually quite great?”

The answer was the Orchestra of St John's, recorded in Dorchester Abbey, the same 12th-century church five miles from the studio where they cut the strings for “How to Disappear Completely”. Colin Greenwood told the players to swing it like jazz musicians. Glissando harmonics, an arrangement Alex Ross described as chords “laced with suspended tones” that “hang mysteriously in the air, somewhere between serenity and sadness”. The bare string track came out on its own in 2021 on Kid A Mnesia.

the first single in three years

Kid A had no singles at all, so this was the band's first since “No Surprises” in 1998, and it went top ten in seven countries: number three in Norway, six in Finland and Italy, ten in Ireland. Shynola made the video, in which a diver explores a sunken city and lets himself into a submerged house; it came from a dream Yorke had, and it won the 2002 NME Carling Award.

NME made it single of the week and called it “malevolent, moving, epic”. Alexis Petridis heard “a beautiful, intricately wrought mesh of complex time signatures, keening vocals, elegiac strings and subtly disturbing audio effects”. Ed O'Brien told Rolling Stone in 2001 that he thought it the best thing the band had done. Rolling Stone, NME and Pitchfork all later named it among the tracks of the decade.

It ran counter to what had come before in Radiohead in lots of ways… The constituent parts are all quite simple, but I think the way that they then blend gives real depth to the song.

philip selway · drowned in sound, 4 february 2015

on stage

It reached the stage two years before the record, in Amsterdam on 13 June 1999.