Scatterbrain

second song in lisbon

It was heard in public before the album was recorded. 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.

yesterday's paper

Thom 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, Greenwood called it “simple and pretty”, and pointed out that its chords never resolve.

It is the 13th of 14 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 Greenwood's guitar carrying this song and “2 + 2 = 5”.

nine months off, then the tour

After Salamanca on 7 August 2002 it sat out 284 days while the album was made, and came back at the Olympia in Dublin on 18 May 2003. Thirty-seven of its 48 nights came that year, and it never opened or closed a show. A live take is track 11 of Hail to the Thief (Live Recordings 2003–2009), released in August 2025, and in the stage Hamlet built on the album that year, Samuel Blenkin's Hamlet sings a scrap of it at his lowest.

skttrbrain

Kieran Hebden, who records as Four Tet, had supported Radiohead on the Spanish and Portuguese dates of 2002, and MTV reported in April 2003 that he would remix this once his own North American tour was done. 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.

Radiohead told me to pick anything I liked.

kieran hebden · onion, november 2004

He made it between the two Radiohead tours he supported and handed it over 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.