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, and he filled them with Ligeti, Messiaen, Dutilleux and Penderecki and two pieces of his own. At the end of the first, at the Royal Festival Hall on 27 March 2005, Thom Yorke came on to sing two Radiohead songs Jonny had arranged for the London Sinfonietta and members of the Nazareth Orchestra, a visiting Arabic orchestra, with Jonny among a row of ondes Martenot players behind him. One was “Where Bluebirds Fly”. The other, called “Arpeggi”, nobody had heard before.

Yorke read the words from lyric sheets; a few of them, about the deepest ocean and the bottom of the sea, had already turned up on radiohead.com. Ed O'Brien, Nigel Godrich and Beck were in the hall. Stephen Pritchard reviewed the night for the Observer and thought Yorke and Jonny, used to stadiums, looked abashed by the whistling, stamping ovation.

not yet a song

It stayed “Arpeggi” until In Rainbows was announced, in October 2007. Colin Greenwood, interviewed by NME in Oxford in March 2006, named it among the new songs the band really loved, and Mark “Spike” Stent worked on it while he was producing the band. At KOKO in Camden on 1 May, at a benefit for The Big Ask before the band's tour, Yorke and Jonny played it as a duo, slowly, Yorke fingerpicking an acoustic guitar over Jonny's softly distorted electric. The full band took it up a week later, on the second night in Copenhagen, and by the first British night of the tour, in Blackpool, it had Yorke, Jonny and O'Brien all on guitar and ran faster.

Mojo's Danny Eccleston heard drum-free, twinkling guitar arpeggios building into embroidery in the style of the Manchester band the Durutti Column, lovely but not a finished song yet, and gave it two stars.

phasing

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

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. Colin told the Sun it was his favourite on the album.

stop-motion, and back

Tobias Stretch made a stop-motion film for it, one of the four winners of the band's Aniboom contest in August 2008, and that year it opened In Rainbows – From the Basement. It was played on 53 nights in 2008, more than in any other year. It dropped out with “Videotape” after Philadelphia on 1 August 2018, and the two came back together in Madrid on 4 November 2025.

lianne la havas

Lianne La Havas had it in her live set with her band before she recorded it, and the session for it, in London, set the course for her self-titled album of 2020, which she made the same way, with her own players in London. Her recording came out in June 2020, a month ahead of the album.

I had the most wonderful, nourishing experience recording that, and that's where I decided: the rest of the album needs to be like this.

lianne la havas · beats per minute, 25 june 2020