Rabbit in Your Headlights

not a radiohead collaboration

Unkle wanted Radiohead. Yorke wanted something else. James Lavelle's account is that after OK Computer, Yorke was “able to slightly dissociate himself from what he needed to attain with Radiohead”, and what he did instead was write this with Josh Davis, DJ Shadow, whose Endtroducing had already left marks all over OK Computer.

He recorded the vocal in California in 1997, on tour. Stereogum later described the result as a “haunting deconstructed piano ballad… a smoky jazz horror show”. The spoken fragments in it are sampled from Jacob's Ladder. It came out on Unkle's Psyence Fiction in 1998.

glazer's tunnel

Jonathan Glazer had directed “Street Spirit” and “Karma Police”, and was unhappy with the second of those, saying he had “missed emotionally and dramatically”. He made this video as its companion, and considers it the one that worked.

Denis Lavant walks down a road inside a tunnel, muttering. Cars hit him. He gets up each time. He takes off his coat and keeps walking bare-chested, and then a car hits him at full speed and he is the one left standing, arms out, in the smoke. Pitchfork, putting it among the best videos of the 1990s, read the tunnel against the death of Princess Diana the year before, and as “walking toward the light at the end of one's life”.

yorke keeps it

He has played it in solo shows and with Atoms for Peace. Radiohead as a band have not.