Street Spirit (Fade Out)

r.e.m. and the famished road

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 his, played by Ed O'Brien. They recorded several versions with John Leckie before one worked, and 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… We spent a day going round in circles until I was thinking, ‘This is never going to happen.’ Then suddenly something happened and I was transported to a place that I'd been willing myself to be in for months on end.

thom yorke · mojo, june 2001

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 removed, so everything drifts. Parlophone paid to fly him to Germany for extra footage of Yorke.

He has called it the turning point in his own work: the band had “found their own voices as an artist”, and “I got close to whatever mine was, and I felt confident that I could do things that emoted, that had some kind of poetic as well as prosaic value”.

number five

Released on 22 January 1996 as the fifth single from The Bends, it reached number five, the band's highest chart position to that point, and settled the one-hit-wonder question for good. Pitchfork, years later, said it “channels a sense of capitalist dread that even class-conscious Britpop artists repressed”, and called it the bridge between The Bends and OK Computer. Stereogum, at the album's twentieth anniversary: “one of the all-time great album closers… a perfectly rendered slice of doomy, incantatory psychedelia that made it sound like Radiohead could do anything”.

Peter Gabriel and the Darkness have both covered it.

how the night ends

It was in the set from 2 November 1993 in Montreal, more than two years before the single, and played 94 times in 1995. Seventy-six of them ended with it, more than any other song: this is what they play when there is nothing left to play.