Song · The King of Limbs era (2011)
Supercollider
Seven minutes long, it was finished a month after The King of Limbs came out.
jun 2008
malahide castle
Thom Yorke sat down alone at the piano at the start of the second encore at Malahide Castle, outside Dublin, on 6 June 2008, and played a song nobody in the crowd had heard. It was not on the written setlist, and he did it again the next night in the same place. The band had been working on it at soundchecks, Stereogum reported, and it had a piano figure in a major key that falls away into a minor passage. Fan footage was online the next day, and Vulture reckoned Radiohead had found a new way to leak a song, by playing it to a crowd.
2010–11
finished late
The band came back to it during the sessions for The King of Limbs, and Ed O'Brien told BBC 6 Music it was recorded there and finished only after the album was out. It was done in March 2011, a month after the release, and it runs for seven minutes on a calm electronic pulse. Rolling Stone gave the single four stars and thought both its songs, this and “The Butcher”, would have sat well in the moodier half of the album.
It came out on a 12-inch double A-side with “The Butcher” for Record Store Day on 16 April 2011, and in North America that June. Two days after Record Store Day the band gave both tracks as downloads to everyone who had ordered the album from their site.
2011–12
nîmes
The whole band first played it to an audience at Roseland in New York on 29 September 2011. On stage it belongs to the King of Limbs tour, and 16 of its 22 nights are from 2012.
At the second of two nights in the Roman arena at Nîmes, on 11 July 2012, Yorke announced it as a new song. Fantin, reviewing for the French webzine Sound Of Violence, pointed out that it had been in the shops for more than a year, thought it the weakest thing in the set, and would rather have had “Staircase”, played the night before.
2021
the album it missed
Chris DeVille, looking back for Stereogum on the album's tenth birthday, called it the kind of epic an album could be built around. He reckoned The King of Limbs would be a fan favourite if it had carried this, “The Butcher”, “The Daily Mail” and “Staircase”.
the session
From the Basement.· Radioheadwatch on youtube →
the record(1)
on stage(5)
Live history
| Times played | 22 shows |
|---|---|
| Live debut | Friday 6 June 2008 · Malahide |
| Last played | Tuesday 6 November 2012 · Auckland |
| Longest absence | 3 years · back on Friday 1 July 2011 · London |
First played live in 2008, 3 years before it was released.
Nights played include broadcasts; opened and closed count gigs only. A cancelled night has no setlist. All setlist stats →
sources10
- “Listen to new Radiohead song online now”, NME, 12 June 2008.
- Amrit Singh, Stereogum, 9 June 2008, for the soundchecks and the piano figure; Ehren Gresehover, Vulture, 9 June 2008, for the new way to leak a song.
- Matthew Perpetua, “Radiohead: There Is No Sequel to ‘The King of Limbs’”, Rolling Stone, 14 April 2011, for O'Brien on finishing it.
- Glenn Peoples, “Radiohead thanks online buyers with two free tracks”, Billboard, 20 April 2011.
- Rob Sheffield, “Supercollider”, Rolling Stone, 25 April 2011.
- Brendan Frank, “Track Review: Radiohead – ‘Supercollider’ / ‘The Butcher’”, Beats Per Minute, 9 May 2011, for the length.
- Relix, video post of “Supercollider”, 30 September 2011, for the first full-band performance.
- Fantin, “Live report : Radiohead - Nîmes, Arènes - 11.07.2012”, Sound Of Violence, July 2012.
- Chris DeVille, “Radiohead's The King of Limbs came out 10 years ago today”, Stereogum, 18 February 2021.
- Performance dates from this site's own setlist archive.