Song · Kid A / Amnesiac era (2000–01)
Treefingers
Ten minutes of Ed O'Brien's guitar, rebuilt in Thom Yorke's sampler into the track this site is named after.
Kid Aalbum- 2000released
- 3:42length
1999–2000
ten minutes of guitar
There is no synthesiser on it. The 2003 version of this site, in its note on the song, passed on what O'Brien had said in an interview: Yorke recorded him playing guitar for about ten minutes, then cut and pasted the recording in his sampler until it was something else. Wikipedia's Kid A article, working from a BBC Radio 3 Mixing It interview with Jonny and Colin Greenwood in January 2001, puts it the same way: O'Brien's guitar loops, digitally processed.
The guitar 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 he named the song when MusicRadar asked whether gear ever dictated the writing.
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.
2000
the middle of the record
It sits fifth of ten, 3:42 long, between “How to Disappear Completely” and “Optimistic”: no words, no beat, nothing a listener could hum. 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 added that 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. Jake Kennedy in Record Collector went for Eno and Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume II.
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.
2000–20
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”.
10 jul 2012
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. It started again at the Arènes de Nîmes on 10 July, and that night, 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. Marc Hogan at Vulture called bringing it out that night an inspired tribute.
They played it again in Nîmes the next night, 11 July. The archive has it on two nights.
after
the name
Hogan's ranking of every Radiohead song put it at 100. A teenager in Bratislava liked it enough to name a fan site after it.
on stage
Live at Nimes 10th of july 2012.· gnuguitouwatch on youtube →
Live history
| Times played | 2 shows |
|---|---|
| Live debut | Tuesday 10 July 2012 · Nîmes |
| Last played | Wednesday 11 July 2012 · Nîmes |
Nights played include broadcasts; opened and closed count gigs only. A cancelled night has no setlist. All setlist stats →
sources13
- The 2003 treefingers.com lyric page for “Treefingers” (
_legacy/lyrics/songs/treefingers.txt), for O'Brien's account of the sampler. - Wikipedia, “Kid A”, for the processed guitar loops (citing Robert Sandall and Mark Russell, Mixing It, BBC Radio 3, 20 January 2001) and the 2020 release.
- Rob Laing and Michael Astley-Brown, “Radiohead's Ed O'Brien: ‘I was always drawn to sounds that didn't sound like the guitar’”, MusicRadar, 14 November 2017, for the Sustainer and the loopers.
- Neil Crossley, “How Radiohead redefined the role of guitar on their landmark album Kid A”, MusicRadar, 10 February 2024, for the Sustainer fitted to the Strat.
- Brent DiCrescenzo, “Kid A”, Pitchfork, 2 October 2000, for Low.
- Simon Reynolds, “Radio Chaos”, Spin, October 2000, for the rain forest and side one.
- Jake Kennedy, “Kid A Rock”, Record Collector, November 2000, for Eno and Selected Ambient Works Volume II.
- April Clare Welsh, “Radiohead's ‘Kid A’: the album's tracks ranked in order of greatness”, NME, 2 October 2015.
- Wikipedia, “Memento (film)”, for Nolan, the end credits and the soundtrack (citing James Mottram, 2002).
- Bill Pearis, “Radiohead share extended ‘Treefingers’ and rare remixes to digital archive”, BrooklynVegan, February 2020.
- Wikipedia, “Radiohead stage collapse”, for the date, the place and Scott Johnson.
- “Radiohead honor late drum tech at first show since stage collapse”, Rolling Stone, 11 July 2012, for “Treefingers” and “Reckoner” in Nîmes.
- Marc Hogan, “I Might Be Wrong: every Radiohead song, ranked”, Vulture, 28 March 2019.