Up on the Ladder

up the ladder

Ed O'Brien's online studio diary has it in the room in the first week of rehearsals for the next album, in July 1999, under the name “up the ladder”. On the Thursday it sounded so lifeless 30 seconds in that Thom Yorke stopped it. Phil Selway got angry, the band talked it through and went again, and the next day Jonny Greenwood brought in what O'Brien called a “Missy Elliott” chord. They spent three hours on it that Friday. In August it got more room, and ran on into “Follow Me Around”.

It was still there in March 2000, when O'Brien reported good drums and a much better arrangement. It made neither Kid A nor Amnesiac, and the band tried again around Hail to the Thief without getting a take they wanted.

the iberian run

They took it on the road in Portugal and Spain in the summer of 2002, from the opening night at the Coliseu in Lisbon, and played it on seven nights of that run. It was one of eight new songs heard that first night, with “There There”, “Sail to the Moon” and “Myxomatosis”, and unlike those three it stayed off Hail to the Thief.

the bonus disc

On 25 September 2007, after a run of cryptic posts in a symbol alphabet, Dead Air Space, the band's blog, put up a blurred photograph of Yorke at a microphone under a line fans knew as the start of this song, and the file name, upontheladder.jpg, had them expecting it on the new album. It did not make In Rainbows either. At 93 Feet East on Brick Lane on 16 January 2008, the night the band played the album in order, Yorke came back alone after “Videotape” and played it on an acoustic guitar, its first night on stage since 2002.

The version on the second disc of In Rainbows, the bonus CD that came only in the discbox edition, is a rebuild, with synthesisers and a gnarled, funk-leaning guitar riff, a long way from the rehearsal room in 1999.