Song · Hail to the Thief era (2003–04)
Sit Down. Stand Up
Written in front of the television news from Rwanda after OK Computer, and left off Radiohead setlists for twenty-one years.
Hail to the Thiefalbum- 2003released
- 4:19length
1998
rwanda on the television
It is older than the album around it. Going through Hail to the Thief track by track for NME in May 2003, Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood said this one was written about five years earlier, in the stretch after OK Computer, while Yorke was watching coverage of Rwanda on television. “I Will” comes from the same months.
The words are short and do one thing. A calm, drilled voice gives orders to sit and to stand, walks people towards hell and reminds them it can wipe them out whenever it likes. It is one of the songs on the record that use Christian ideas of heaven and hell, which Radiohead had not done before. The full title adds “(Snakes & Ladders.)”, which was on the list of possible names for the album itself, alongside the subtitles that went to “Go to Sleep” and “There There”.
jul 2002
too popular for its own good
The band first played it on 23 July 2002, the second of their three nights at the Coliseu dos Recreios in Lisbon. NME's Johnny Davis heard a keyboard figure, samples from Jonny Greenwood and drums that kept speeding up. It went down so well that Yorke ruled it out of the next few sets, which did not last: the archive has it on ten nights in 2002.
2002–03
mingus, and the raindrops
Most of the album was cut in about two and a half weeks in Los Angeles with Nigel Godrich, often a song a day. On the interview CD sent to the press in April 2003 the band called this an electronic song with Charles Mingus behind it.
It ends on a single phrase, “the rain drops”, sung again and again over a beat that keeps climbing. Chuck Klosterman counted 46 of them and gave the same reason as for the title “Myxomatosis”: Yorke liked the way it sounded on tape. The lyric sheet the 2003 version of this site kept makes it 47.
The creeping Orwellian laser-tag terror.
michael nelson · stereogum, 7 june 2013
CBS's CSI used an extract of it in an episode at the start of May 2003, a month before the album was out.
2002–25
on stage
The archive has it on 98 nights: ten in 2002, 62 in 2003, eight in 2004. It opened the night once and has never closed one. At the Tweeter Center in Mansfield on 13 August 2003, the first night of the North American tour, it came second, stripped back, after “2 + 2 = 5”.
Then it disappeared. After the Coachella night at Indio on 1 May 2004 it was not played again for 7,857 days, until Radiohead's first show in seven years at the Movistar Arena in Madrid on 4 November 2025, where it was the third song of the night. It stayed in: 18 nights in 2025, the last at the Royal Arena in Copenhagen on 16 December, a date put back from 2 December after Yorke's throat infection.
2025
elsinore
Hamlet Hail to the Thief, the RSC and Factory International staging Yorke made with Christine Jones and Steven Hoggett, opens on it: strobes, blades and falling bodies, in Daniel Dylan Wray's account for Pitchfork. A live take is track two of Hail to the Thief (Live Recordings 2003–2009), released by XL on 13 August 2025.
the video
The official promo film.· Radioheadwatch on youtube →
takes(2)
Live history
| Times played | 98 shows |
|---|---|
| Live debut | Tuesday 23 July 2002 · Lisbon |
| Last played | Tuesday 16 December 2025 · Copenhagen |
| Longest absence | 21 years · back on Tuesday 4 November 2025 · Madrid |
Nights played include broadcasts; opened and closed count gigs only. A cancelled night has no setlist. All setlist stats →
sources11
- Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood, track-by-track guide to Hail to the Thief, NME, 10 May 2003, for the date of writing and Rwanda.
- Wikipedia, “Hail to the Thief”, for the heaven-and-hell theme (citing Tate, p. 182), the album-title candidates (citing Michael Odell, Q, July 2003, and Xfm London, 2 July 2003) and the Mingus influence (citing the Parlophone interview CD, 22 April 2003).
- Johnny Davis, feature on the Lisbon shows, NME, 3 August 2002, for the premiere and Yorke's reaction.
- Chuck Klosterman, “No More Knives”, Spin, July 2003 (republished 11 March 2023), for the recording pace and the 46 raindrops.
- The 2003 lyrics page for the song, as preserved on this site.
- Michael Nelson, “Hail To The Thief Turns 10”, Stereogum, 7 June 2013.
- The site's own 2003 desk, for CSI.
- Shawn Fitzgerald, “Radiohead @ Tweeter Center, Mansfield”, musicOMH, 13 August 2003.
- Wikipedia, “2025 Radiohead tour”, for the Madrid running order and the Copenhagen postponement.
- Daniel Dylan Wray, review of Hamlet Hail to the Thief, Pitchfork, 8 May 2025.
- Wikipedia, “Hail to the Thief (Live Recordings 2003–2009)”, for the live album.