Separator

mouse dog bird

Yorke first played it on his own at the Corn Exchange in Cambridge, at a benefit for the Green Party candidate Tony Juniper, under the title “Mouse Dog Bird”. It came in the encore. Varsity's reviewers noted it as another new song and the room as delighted with it. Ryan Leas at Stereogum later said that hearing solo versions like this one and “Lotus Flower” had made him expect a very different album: stark, spectral folk.

the closer

What closed The King of Limbs a year later was something else. Phil Selway's beat is crisp and light, Colin Greenwood's bass pokes at it softly, and Jonny Greenwood plays a watery guitar figure that Jon Dolan in Rolling Stone heard as inverted. Keyboards glow underneath; Andy Gill in the Independent heard piano and some pleasing guitar filigree. In the right channel a crowd of Yorkes murmurs without quite forming words, which Will Hermes in Rolling Stone heard as ghosts. Pitchfork's Mark Pytlik heard a touch of Neil Young in the guitar, and Jordan Blum at Consequence heard classic Stevie Wonder.

For Leas, this is where the album's mood turns.

A bright left turn of the sort the band has hardly ever recorded.

ryan leas · stereogum, 10 march 2015

waking up

The lyric describes coming round from a long, vivid dream and setting down a weight, and near the end a quiet plea to be woken rises out of the mix. Dolan thought it might be about dying, and still rated it as lovely as anything they had made. Chris DeVille at Stereogum heard it the other way round, as the record coming out of the dark and into the morning after “Codex” and “Give Up the Ghost”.

the last line

Then there is the last line, which warns the listener not to assume this is the end, sung on a track called “Separator”, closing an album of eight songs and 37 minutes. Rumours of a second album coming soon went round, and nothing in them was true. Radiohead did release more that year, the Record Store Day single of “Supercollider” and “The Butcher” on 16 April and later “The Daily Mail” and “Staircase”, but no second part.

I didn't realise it was its own planet.

thom yorke · rolling stone, 26 april 2012

Four Tet's remix came out on the third TKOL RMX 12-inch on 29 July 2011. Anstam made two, one for the seventh single on 10 October and a second for the eighth.

the long gap

It was sixth in the surprise Glastonbury set on 24 June 2011, the first night in the archive. Fifty nights in 2012, then a steady handful each year to 2018, never as the opener or the closer. After Philadelphia on 31 July 2018 it went away for 2,654 days. It came back in Madrid on 5 November 2025 and was played ten times before the year was out. The archive counts 88, the last at the Royal Arena in Copenhagen on 16 December 2025.