Scatterbrain

second song in lisbon

It was heard in public before most of the album existed. On 22 July 2002 Radiohead opened the first of three nights at the Coliseu dos Recreios in Lisbon with eight songs nobody knew, and this was the second of them, straight after “There There”. NME's Johnny Davis noted a brief guitar coda. Four Tet, Kieran Hebden, was supporting them on those Spanish and Portuguese dates, which matters later.

yesterday's paper

Yorke and Jonny Greenwood went through the album song by song for NME in May 2003, and this one, they said, is partly about old newspapers blowing about in the wind. The lyric is a storm from the inside: a gale, birds thrown around, a roof coming away, the day's headlines and the day's people carried off together, and a narrator who only wishes he could fall through a hole of his own. The full title adds “(As Dead as Leaves.)”.

simple and pretty

On the interview CD Parlophone sent to the press in April 2003, Jonny Greenwood called it “simple and pretty”, and pointed out that its chords do not resolve. The song keeps drifting down towards a resting place and is over before it gets one.

It is the thirteenth of fourteen tracks, three minutes 21 seconds. The French station RTL2 played it with “There There” around midnight on 1 April 2003, more than two months before the release. Reviewing the album for the Dallas Observer on 5 June 2003, Robert Wilonsky heard Jonny Greenwood's guitar carrying this song and “2 + 2 = 5”. Michael Nelson at Stereogum, looking back ten years later, called it “the majestic descending float”.

skttrbrain

MTV reported in April 2003 that Hebden would remix it once his own North American tour was done. He later told the Australian magazine Onion that the choice of song was his. He made the remix between the two Radiohead tours he supported and gave it to them at the start of the second, in Ireland. They promised not to play it in front of him in case it was too intense. The next night he walked into their dressing room and it was on, loud.

Radiohead told me to pick anything I liked.

kieran hebden · onion, november 2004

It came out as “Skttrbrain” on the “2 + 2 = 5” single on 17 November 2003, went onto the Com Lag (2plus2isfive) EP in Japan and Australia on 24 March 2004, and was the second track on the first disc of Four Tet's own Remixes, released by Domino on 25 September 2006.

on stage

The archive has it on 49 nights: nine in 2002, 38 in 2003 and two in 2004. It never opened or closed a show. After Salamanca on 7 August 2002 it sat out 284 days while the album was made, returning at the Olympia in Dublin on 18 May 2003. The last time was in Chiba on 18 April 2004, and that was that. A live take is track 11 of Hail to the Thief (Live Recordings 2003–2009), released in August 2025.

In the 2025 stage Hamlet built on the album, Samuel Blenkin's Hamlet is given part of it.