The Numbers

jonny's bit

In November 2015 Thom Yorke sat down with George Monbiot for the French magazine Télérama, ahead of the UN climate conference in Paris. Asked about protest songs, he said they had worked as calls to arms in the 1960s and would not now, and that if he wrote one about climate change that year it would be shit.

On 4 December he was on stage at Le Trianon for Pathway to Paris, a benefit held during the conference, playing a new song called “Silent Spring”, the title of Rachel Carson's 1962 book on pesticides. Sharan Shetty wrote in Slate that it would be one of the band's most openly political songs if it was a band song at all, and Daniel Kreps, in Rolling Stone, put it next to “You and Whose Army?” and “Dollars and Cents”. Partway through, Yorke stopped to credit a passage to someone else, and the reports took it as a sign of where the song was headed.

This is Jonny's bit.

thom yorke · diy, 5 december 2015

a jam, with strings

On A Moon Shaped Pool it became “The Numbers”, track eight in a running order that happens to be alphabetical; Jonny Greenwood said they kept that order only because the sequence worked. It starts as a loose early-1970s jam, Greg Kot in the Chicago Tribune and Alexis Petridis in the Guardian both thought, until the strings come in. Petridis heard them borrowing, on purpose, from “Melody”, the opening track of Serge Gainsbourg's Histoire de Melody Nelson. Will Hermes in Rolling Stone called it cosmic folk-jazz and traced its chattering ghost voices to Lee Perry.

port talbot and tarzana

Grant Gee, who made Meeting People Is Easy, shot the last of the album's short Instagram films for it in Port Talbot, the south Wales steel town, and it went up on 8 July 2016. Paul Thomas Anderson filmed Yorke and Jonny Greenwood playing it outdoors in Tarzana, California, and Radiohead released that on 5 October, three weeks after Anderson's “Present Tense”. Robin Hilton at NPR noted that the two of them had stripped out the studio effects, percussion and piano and done it with two guitars and a drum machine. Nigel Godrich mixed the recording.

lights to call them back

The band first played it together in Amsterdam on 20 May 2016, and that year it usually came straight after “Identikit”. At the KeyArena in Seattle on 8 April 2017 it closed the main set, and the arena held up its phone lights to call the band back for three encores. It stayed in the set until Philadelphia on 31 July 2018, and the 2025 shows left it out.

one day at a time

The first half is about the earth, belonging to it and going back into it, and puts the future inside the people singing rather than somewhere else. The second half turns to the people and the system. Numbers do not decide, the system is lying, and what was taken will be taken back, a day at a time. Talking to Matt Everitt on BBC Radio 6 Music in 2017, Yorke said the refrain was aimed at a leader who would not last.

You are not a leader, love… You can't sustain this.

thom yorke · bbc radio 6 music, 2017