Videotape

driving him crazy

It was one of the first things they had. Yorke told David Fricke in Blackpool in May 2006 that it was full of cyclical melodies and that they had been smashing their heads against a wall over what to do with it. He had already sung it alone at the piano in 2005, for the pilot episode of Godrich's From the Basement, a film the band finally put out in 2021.

On Chicago's Sound Opinions that June he said it had been driving him absolutely crazy through rehearsals, and that the cure was to play it on the first night in London, wrong or not, in front of everybody. That was the Hammersmith Apollo on 18 May 2006, and it opened the show. Mojo's Danny Eccleston heard heavy piano chords lagging behind Phil Selway's rim-clicks and Jonny Greenwood's skeletal ska chops, building and building, and gave it four stars. Through that tour it stayed a band arrangement, Selway's drums climbing to a climax.

where the one was

Yorke tried everything. One day he decided it should be a fast pulse, four to the floor, with the rest built on top; he told Wired he first heard it as a post-rave trance track in the manner of Surgeon. Nobody could agree where the bar started. Selway reckoned they spent about a year of rehearsals on it, every one of them losing the count at some point.

all trying to agree on where the one was

phil selway · the new york times, 9 december 2007

the hospital

They recorded it in December 2006 at Godrich's studio at the Hospital Club in Covent Garden. Yorke, by his own account, was semi-thrown out of the room for being a negative influence. He and Stanley Donwood came back at about eleven at night, a bit worse for wear, to find that Jonny and Godrich had done something to it that left them both in tears.

They'd stripped all the nonsense away that I'd been piling onto it

thom yorke · mojo, february 2008

What was left is piano, voice and a Roland TR-909. Yorke told Wired that Greenwood was obsessed with shifting where the bar begins, and the drum pattern sits so far off centre that, as Matt Mullen put it in MusicRadar, it throws the listener's sense of the downbeat.

the tape

The lyric is about taping a good day to be watched after you are dead, which is how Jon Pareles summed it up in the New York Times. A line near the start puts Mephistopheles below the pearly gates, and fans wrote to the Observer Music Monthly with theories linking the album to Goethe's Faust; Yorke said he vaguely knew the story and would have to look it up. Pitchfork's Mark Pytlik pictured Yorke, by then a father of two, filming his children.

last, not first

Godrich told Rolling Stone that if it had been up to him and Yorke it would have opened In Rainbows; it was both their favourite, and everyone else called them crazy. Yorke told Radio 4's Today the same thing, adding that someone pointed out everybody would switch the record off, and called it his favourite thing the band had made. To Wired he called it absolute agony.

Fans who knew the solo piano version expected a big finale. Pytlik got a circling piano coda and a climax that never arrives. On the bonus disc, “MK 1” brings back a few of its notes, and the band played it with the 909 on the Scotch Mist webcast on New Year's Eve 2007. In August 2008 an animated film for it by Wolfgang Jaiser and Claus Winter was one of four entries the band paid $10,000 each in their Aniboom contest, unable to pick one winner.

on stage

The archive has it on 120 nights, 23 of them in 2006 and 53 in 2008. It opened once, at Hammersmith on its first night, and has never closed a show. It went unplayed for 2,652 days after Philadelphia on 1 August 2018, came back in Madrid on 4 November 2025, and was last heard in Copenhagen on 15 December 2025.