Subterranean Homesick Alien

a martian in oxford

At Abingdon School Yorke was set an exercise in Martian poetry, the small British fashion that followed Craig Raine's “A Martian Sends a Postcard Home”: describe ordinary life as if you had just arrived from another planet. He told Launch the first essay he wrote began with an alien standing in the middle of Oxford, wondering what these people were.

Years later he hit a bird with his car on a country road home. The 2003 site's note says he believed it was a pheasant, and that he got out of the car and started thinking about abduction. The song's narrator is the human in that picture, bored with his town, hoping to be taken, and sure that nobody would believe him if he came back.

uptight

It started as a folky acoustic duo for Yorke and Jonny Greenwood, and Greenwood called it “Uptight”. He wrote the intro, the chorus and the outro; Yorke wrote the verses. The title that stuck borrows from Bob Dylan's “Subterranean Homesick Blues”.

Nigel Godrich remembered Yorke having just written it during the sessions for The Bends, sitting with his little book on his knees and turning the pages. The archive has it on stage from 4 April 1995, at KCRW's studios in Santa Monica, and twenty times that year, two years before it came out.

bitches brew on the bus

Miles Davis's Bitches Brew was a tour-bus favourite, and Select heard the electric keyboards here as the band reaching for it. Greenwood said, in Mac Randall's Exit Music, that none of them could play the trumpet, but they could at least aim for the atmosphere and end up with their own garbled version. So the song swims: Yorke on a Fender Rhodes, Greenwood's guitar run through pedals, and reverb over everything. The New York Times heard “Pharaoh's Dance” in it.

It was one of four songs nearly done at Canned Applause, before the move to St Catherine's Court. Greenwood still regrets one lost moment: a few bars Yorke played, with the reverb doing something great, wiped by mistake and never recovered from the hard drive. What they kept was nearly as good, he said. Yorke's reference point for the whole thing was Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

hope, mostly

Greenwood, who called himself an enormous cynic who sides with science, did not think it was a song about aliens at all. Before UFOs, he said in 1999, people went looking for the Virgin Mary; each generation brings its cameras to a different place.

I feel the song is more about hope than any other subject.

jonny greenwood · 1999, via ultimate classic rock

The Guardian ranked it 22nd among Radiohead songs in 2020 and heard in it Yorke watching aliens watching humanity. Marc Hogan put it 17th in his ranking for Vulture. For Consequence it was 37th, with notes that drip “like a spoonful of honey”.

on stage

The archive counts 102 nights. Forty-nine were in 1997 and twenty in 1998, its busiest years. It has never opened a show and has closed nine. After Santa Barbara on 11 April 2017 it disappeared for 3,129 days, returning in Madrid on 4 November 2025, and was last heard in Casalecchio di Reno on 14 November 2025.

Junior Jazz sang it on Radiodread, the Easy Star All-Stars' 2006 reggae OK Computer.