Subterranean Homesick Alien

a martian in oxford

At Abingdon School Thom Yorke was set an exercise in Martian poetry, the small British fashion that followed Craig Raine's “A Martian Sends a Postcard Home”, which describes ordinary life as if the writer had just arrived from another planet. He told the music site Launch that the first essay he wrote put him as an alien standing in the middle of Oxford, asked how he would see these people.

Years later he hit a bird with his car on a country road home. The note on the 2003 version of this site 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 and hoping to be taken, and sure that his friends would never believe him if he came back.

uptight

It started as a folky acoustic duo for Yorke and Jonny Greenwood; Greenwood called it “Uptight”. Greenwood wrote the intro, the chorus and the outro, and Yorke the verses. 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.

Yorke and Jonny Greenwood played it on a Radio 1 session in London on 17 May 1995, after “Black Star” and “Street Spirit (Fade Out)”. Yorke introduced it as a new one the band only half knew, and Greenwood read out the chords, D minor, G sharp and D major, and then the title, which borrows from Bob Dylan's “Subterranean Homesick Blues”.

It's called Subterranean Homesick Alien, in deference to Sir Bob, Saint Bob.

jonny greenwood · radio 1 session, may 1995

The archive has it on stage from 4 April 1995, at KCRW's studios in Santa Monica, and on twenty-one nights that year, two years before it came out.

bitches brew on the bus

Miles Davis's Bitches Brew was a favourite on the tour bus, and Select heard the electric keyboards here as the band reaching for it. He could not play the trumpet, Jonny Greenwood told Mac Randall for his book Exit Music, but they could aim for the atmosphere and end up with their own garbled version. Yorke is on a Fender Rhodes and Greenwood puts his guitar through his pedals, with reverb over everything, and the New York Times later heard “Pharaoh's Dance”, the opening track of Bitches Brew, in it.

It was one of four songs nearly done at Canned Applause, the band's rehearsal shed near Didcot, before the move to St Catherine's Court, the country house near Bath where most of OK Computer was made. In 2017 Greenwood still regretted one moment from it, a few bars Yorke played with the reverb doing something great, which were wiped, through a mistake or something like one, and could not be got back. What they kept was nearly as good, he said. Yorke's reference point for the whole thing was Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

eight years away

It was a regular on the OK Computer tour, forty-nine nights in 1997, and after that it turned up only now and then. It has closed a show nine times and never opened one. After Santa Barbara on 11 April 2017 it was gone for 3,129 days, until the first night of the 2025 tour in Madrid on 4 November.

The pianist Christopher O'Riley put it on True Love Waits, his 2003 album of Radiohead transcriptions, and played it in Portland for NPR's Performance Today. Junior Jazz sang it on Radiodread, the Easy Star All-Stars' 2006 reggae OK Computer.

hope, mostly

Jonny Greenwood, who calls himself an enormous cynic and is on the side of 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 takes its cameras somewhere different.

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

jonny greenwood · 1999, via ultimate classic rock

Yorke was less kind to the whole business. In July 1997 he told the Los Angeles Times that the obsession with outer space and alien abduction was misplaced spirituality, and a way out of social responsibility.