Weird Fishes/Arpeggi

royal festival hall

Jonny Greenwood had been asked to curate the two evenings that closed the Ether festival on London's South Bank. He filled them with Ligeti, Messiaen, Dutilleux and Penderecki, and with two of his own pieces. At the end Yorke came on and sang two Radiohead adaptations with the London Sinfonietta, members of the Nazareth Orchestra and a line of ondes Martenot players, Greenwood among them. One was “Arpeggi”, premiered that night; the other was “Where Bluebirds Fly”.

Stephen Pritchard reviewed it in the Observer a week later and thought the two of them, used to stadiums, looked embarrassed by the ovation. The archive has 27 March 2005 as the song's first night, one of two in 2005. (Wikipedia's In Rainbows article puts the Ether show in July 2005; Pritchard's review ran on 3 April.)

not yet a song

It stayed “Arpeggi” for another year and a half. Colin Greenwood named it to NME in March 2006 as one of the songs the band really loved, and it was among the tracks Mark “Spike” Stent worked on while he was producing them. When the band went back on the road in May 2006 they aired it on the opening nights at Blackpool and Wolverhampton.

Not everybody was sold yet. Mojo's Danny Eccleston heard drum-free, twinkling guitar arpeggios building into Durutti Column-style embroidery, and gave it two stars.

Pretty, but not yet a ‘song’ as such.

danny eccleston · mojo, august 2006

phasing

On the record it was renamed and rebuilt. Mark Pytlik in Pitchfork heard new drums behind the arpeggios and said it swelled as massively as the live versions had promised. Jonny Greenwood added celeste and wrote the strings. The way the guitar parts drift against each other owes something to Steve Reich, and Greenwood said as much in 2025, ahead of playing Reich's Pulse with the Hallé: he had borrowed Reich's phasing ideas, in a simple way, for “Let Down” and for this.

The size of it was a problem. Ed O'Brien told Mojo that every time they tried to hold it back from being big, it stopped working.

Arpeggi, for example, is a song that's obviously epic in scope.

ed o'brien · mojo, february 2008

the seabed

Jon Pareles, writing in the New York Times, heard a narrator wondering why he should stay, then sinking and decomposing underwater, worms and all. Mark Binelli in Rolling Stone noticed the plural in the title, and thought that every time Yorke howled it, the bad grammar made him sound like a demented schoolboy. Spin's Lane Brown said the song proved Radiohead could write a Supergrass song whenever they liked, then admitted nobody had asked. Colin Greenwood told the Sun it was his favourite on the album.

stop-motion

Tobias Stretch made a stop-motion film for it in the Aniboom contest, and in August 2008 it was one of four entries the band could not choose between, so each got the $10,000 prize. That year it also opened In Rainbows – From the Basement.

on stage

The archive counts 207 nights: 53 of them in 2008, 41 in 2012. It has opened three shows and never closed one. It dropped out after Philadelphia on 1 August 2018 and stayed out for 2,652 days, returning in Madrid on 4 November 2025, and the last night on file is Copenhagen, 16 December 2025.