Street Spirit (Fade Out)

r.e.m. and the famished road

Thom Yorke has traced it to R.E.M. and to Ben Okri's 1991 novel The Famished Road. The arpeggio that runs the whole length of it is Ed O'Brien's playing. The band recorded several versions with John Leckie before one worked, a day of going round in circles, Yorke said, until suddenly something happened and he was somewhere he had been trying to get to for months. When it did, the band knew something had changed in how they wrote.

If I ever forget why I started this as a career, then [‘Street Spirit’] is why I started.

thom yorke · mojo, june 2001

It is one of three songs on the album that kept Leckie's own mix, after EMI sent the rest of the tapes to Sean Slade and Paul Q. Kolderie. In the fan-club booklet Answerphone 01, O'Brien called it Jonny's favourite on the record, and said nothing else could have ended it.

number five

Released on 22 January 1996 as the fifth single from The Bends, it reached number five, the highest the band had been in the British singles chart, two places above the reissued “Creep”. It has been covered since: Peter Gabriel recorded it for Scratch My Back, his 2010 album of other people's songs, and the Darkness for Hot Cakes in 2012.

belfast, 14 september 2001

It was in the set from 2 November 1993 in Montreal, more than two years before the single, and 97 of its nights came in 1995 alone. Sixty-nine times it was the last song of the night.

The band had been in Berlin on 11 September and played that night, and three days later, at the Odyssey in Belfast, the last European night of the run, Yorke dedicated it, just before they played it, to the people caught up in the attacks on New York and Washington, and to “any Americans currently trying to get back home”. With flights in and out of the United States restricted, many of them could not.

the video in the desert

Yorke went to Jonathan Glazer after seeing his video for Massive Attack's “Karmacoma”. Glazer shot in black and white over two nights in a desert outside Los Angeles, using a trick from nature documentaries, high-speed cameras with frames taken out, so that everything drifts. He spent so long on other shots, breaking glass and nuns jumping off trampolines, that he had not got the performance he wanted from Yorke, and cut the video with black windows where the singer should have been; Parlophone liked it enough to send him to Germany a few weeks later to film Yorke singing. Glazer has called it the turning point in his own work, the video where he first felt sure he could make things that moved people.

The slow backwards fall is Yorke's own. He did it himself after three or four whiskies, Glazer told the magazine Raw, onto a mattress that was later taken out of the picture by computer.