Treefingers

ten minutes of guitar

There is no synthesiser on it. Thom Yorke recorded Ed O'Brien playing guitar for about ten minutes, then cut and pasted the recording in his sampler until it was something else; O'Brien told the story in an interview, and the 2003 version of this site passed it on. Jonny and Colin Greenwood described it the same way on BBC Radio 3's Mixing It in January 2001, as O'Brien's guitar loops, digitally processed.

The sound was new too. O'Brien had fitted a Fernandes Sustainer to his Strat, which holds a note for as long as he wants it, and he ran it into loops and delays. Seventeen years later, when MusicRadar asked whether gear had ever dictated the writing, this was the song he named.

Treefingers: that was the Sustainer with one of the first loopers that came in.

ed o'brien · musicradar, 14 november 2017

The Akai HeadRush and the Line 6 DL4 came out, he said, just as he built that guitar, and suddenly the sounds were there.

the middle of the record

It sits fifth of ten on Kid A, 3:42 long, between “How to Disappear Completely” and “Optimistic”, with no words. Brent DiCrescenzo's Pitchfork review on release day heard side two of Bowie and Eno's Low in it. Simon Reynolds in Spin heard a rain forest waking up, and thought it felt like the classic weird track at the end of side one of an LP, which on a CD it more or less is. Fifteen years on, April Clare Welsh at NME pointed out that a song with a name that creepy is the calmest thing on the record.

the long version

Christopher Nolan wanted “Paranoid Android” over the end credits of Memento and could not get the rights; the film closes on David Bowie's “Something in the Air” instead. The soundtrack album got Radiohead anyway, in the form of an extended “Treefingers”. That longer cut went up on the band's digital archive of rarities in February 2020, alongside Nellee Hooper's remix of “Talk Show” and a remix of “The Gloaming”.

nîmes

On 16 June 2012 the stage collapsed at Downsview Park in Toronto while it was being built for a Radiohead show, and killed Scott Johnson, their drum technician, who was 33 and from Doncaster. The tour stopped. When it started again at the Arènes de Nîmes on 10 July, twelve years after the record, they played “Treefingers” live for the first time. Later in the show, for a third encore, they played “Reckoner” with pictures of Johnson on the screen behind them. They played “Treefingers” again in Nîmes the next night, and Marc Hogan at Vulture called bringing it out an inspired tribute.

the name

Hogan's ranking of every Radiohead song put it at 100. A fan in Bratislava liked it enough to name this fan site after it.

In 2026 BBE added a cover by Vikter Duplaix to the 20th anniversary edition of Exit Music: Songs with Radio Heads, its album of other people's versions of Radiohead songs, which had left “Treefingers” out in 2006. Tower Records Japan lists it as a bonus track.