You and Whose Army?

the voices, then blair

When Nick Kent asked Thom Yorke for Mojo whether the song was about Tony Blair, Yorke laughed and said it had not begun that way.

Originally, it was about the voices in my head.

thom yorke · mojo, june 2001

Once he had the phrase in the title, other ideas stuck to it, and Blair came out as the real subject, someone voted into power who then betrays the people who put him there. In the same answer Yorke called the prime minister a fool and a court jester. On Spin With a Grin, the site the band had set up the year before to answer questions, a journalist asked whether it might become an anthem against the 2001 election, and Yorke wrote back that the song was not a personal attack. He would not be voting, he wrote, and would not vote for a man willing to go along with “son of star wars”, the American missile-defence plan; he told the questioner never to believe anything in the NME, and saved a line for Alastair Campbell, Blair's director of communications, whom he called unelected.

the ink spots and an egg box

Ed O'Brien's studio diary for 1 September 1999 has it saving the day after two unimpressive goes at “Follow Me Around”, with Jonny Greenwood arguing for voice and guitar alone right up to the end section.

The sound they wanted for those first two minutes was the Ink Spots, the 1940s harmony group, soft and close, and Simon Reynolds reported in The Wire that they muffled microphones with egg boxes and ran the voice through the palme diffuseur, the resonating loudspeaker of Jonny's ondes Martenot. Unlike many of the songs from those sessions, it was recorded live, the whole band playing at once. O'Brien told Rolling Stone they rehearsed it a little and then just did it, two minutes of holding back before the last minute breaks loose.

In the Radiohead of old… that break would have lasted four minutes.

ed o'brien · rolling stone, 24 may 2001

blair's faces

It was on the setlist a year before the record existed. At the Arènes de Fréjus on 17 June 2000, its first night, Yorke began it alone and the band came in about three minutes later, with Colin Greenwood on an old double bass; at the Royal Festival Hall in London a fortnight later Yorke dedicated it to Blair: “I'm only disappointed I never got to shake his hand.” It has been played on 224 nights in all, and opened 10 of them. After Boston on 28 July 2018 it was gone for 2,656 days, and came back on the first night of the 2025 tour in Madrid.

Cameras keep finding their way into it. At the Hollywood Bowl in August 2001 Yorke turned the one fixed to his microphone stand round on the audience, and in Madrid it was back, catching every raised eyebrow. The camera did its best work at Earls Court on 26 November 2003, the first of two nights there and a week after George W. Bush's state visit to London. Yorke opened the first encore by complaining about the visit, then sang the song pulling faces for the close-up on the giant screens either side of the stage. NME reported that the impression was mostly eyebrows.

Last week, our nation's capital was hijacked, and these are the kind of faces Blair pulls when Bush comes to visit.

thom yorke, on stage · xfm, 26 november 2003

incendies

Denis Villeneuve opened Incendies, his film of Wajdi Mouawad's play, on the song, a wordless tracking shot of nearly five minutes in which soldiers shave the heads of a room of boys and one boy, with three marks on his heel, stares down the camera. Villeneuve told the Los Angeles Times he shot and cut the scene to the song with no guarantee he could have it. The band let him once they had seen a rough cut, and the film, which uses “Like Spinning Plates” as well, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.