Stupid Car

the drill ep

Drill, out on 5 May 1992, was Radiohead's first record, and the first thing Parlophone released by them. Only two of its four tracks were new recordings, “Prove Yourself” and this one, cut at Courtyard Studio in Oxfordshire with Chris Hufford producing and engineering and Timm Baldwin mixing; “You” and “Thinking About You” came from the band's Manic Hedgehog demo, the demo cassette they had made as On a Friday and sold at the Oxford record shop of that name.

Fan archives trace the words to a road accident Thom Yorke survived in 1987. Cars come back again and again in his songs, and a 2021 review of Kid A Mnesia in Cherwell, the Oxford student paper, put the driving in “Follow Me Around” in a line with “Killer Cars”, “Airbag” (1997), “Traffic” and this.

It never made a studio album. A hazy reworking, the “Tinnitus mix”, went onto the Volume compilation series, and the Drill version came back as “Stupid Car (Demo)” on the second disc of the Pablo Honey Collector's Edition in 2009.