The Tourist

a square in france

The music is Jonny Greenwood's, all of it, and the rest of the band treat it as his song. The picture behind it came from France, from a beautiful square on a sunny day and a party of American tourists being wheeled round it, trying to see everything in ten minutes because they had to be in Paris in the morning. Thom Yorke told the story to Select. The 2003 version of this site put Jonny in the square, appalled that anyone could stand somewhere so lovely and not stop to look.

Yorke wrote the words. In 2017 he told Rolling Stone that Jonny had come up with an incredibly slow riff, so he started singing about slowing down, at a time when the band were travelling without a break and everything felt like speed. He traced the chorus to one morning in Germany, short of sleep and paranoid, looking for breakfast and finding only a dog barking at him while everyone else carried on. It sounds like a song about technology, he said, and it is not.

That song was written to me from me.

thom yorke · launch, 2 may 1997

a song with space

Jonny told Humo he was surprised the other four let him do it, since it did not sound like Radiohead at all. His point was that nothing has to happen every three seconds.

It has become a song with space.

jonny greenwood · humo, 22 july 1997

It moves as a slow waltz, with the Mellotron choir from “Exit Music” and “Lucky” coming back and a scraping solo from Jonny in the choruses. At the end the guitars drop away to drums and bass, and then comes a small bell. Nigel Godrich, who produced the record, called it a triangle and thought Phil Selway played it. Jonny, quoted on the 2003 site, said Yorke did not play a note on the track and just listened. Yorke, on the same page, said of Jonny's songwriting that whenever he himself was tired, Jonny was there and awake.

Accounts of when it was finished differ. Colin Greenwood's history of the sessions, written for Capitol's press kit, has it among four songs recorded at Canned Applause, the band's rehearsal shed, and the writer Tim Footman, in his book on the album, agrees; Ultimate Classic Rock has Jonny placing it at the end of the sessions at St Catherine's Court, the country house near Bath where most of the album was made, as they were about to pack up.

closing the record

The band spent two weeks on the running order. Yorke said it was obvious this had to close the record, since so much of the album was about background noise and everything moving too fast to keep up with.

It sounds like the last song on an album.

jonny greenwood · quoted on the 2003 site

Israel Vibration sang it in 2006 on Radiodread, the Easy Star All-Stars' track-for-track reggae version of the album, where it is the last of the album's songs, before the dub bonus tracks.

the last song live

It took the same job on stage. The archive first has it at Zeleste in Barcelona on 24 May 1997, and of its seventy-eight nights it has closed fifty-one and opened none.

One of those closers was at the Theater at Madison Square Garden in New York on 14 June 2006, and one of George W. Bush's daughters left during it, six bodyguards pushing a way out for her through the crowd. From the stage the band could see shoving and scuffling at the back of the hall without knowing why. Yorke was told only afterwards, and wrote on the band's blog that he would have objected too, more forcefully had he known whose bodyguards they were, which was perhaps why nobody had told him who was in the building.

After Victoria Park in London on 24 June 2008 it was gone for 3,201 days, until Miami on 30 March 2017, and the 2025 tour left it out.

the last chord

Alex Ross, following the band for The New Yorker in 2001, reported a soundcheck at which nobody could remember the last chord, Jonny included, though he wrote it, and nobody had a copy of OK Computer to check. Weeks later Ed O'Brien suggested D7.