You and Whose Army?

the voices, then blair

Nick Kent asked Yorke for Mojo in June 2001 whether the song was about 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, he said, 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 he called the prime minister a fool and a court jester, and insisted it was never personal.

He said so again on the band's Spin With a Grin question page, answering a fan who wanted it made an anti-election anthem in 2001. It was not a personal attack, he wrote; he would not be voting, and would not vote for a man willing to go along with “son of star wars”. He also advised never to believe what she read in the NME, and saved a line for Alastair Campbell, whom he called unelected.

the ink spots and an egg box

The sound they wanted for the first two minutes was the Ink Spots, the 1940s harmony group, soft and warm. Simon Reynolds reported in The Wire that the band muffled the vocal microphone with egg boxes and treated the voice with the palme diffuseur, the ondes Martenot's resonating loudspeaker. The whole band was playing at once, so everything on the track went through the egg box.

Unlike much of what came out of those sessions, it was played live. Ed O'Brien told Rolling Stone they rehearsed it a little and then just did it. He described its shape as two minutes of holding back before the last minute breaks out.

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

ed o'brien · rolling stone, 24 may 2001

the reviews

David Fricke heard it open as a stark prayer at the piano, somewhere between John Lennon's “Imagine” and Nina Simone. Jon Pareles gave it Yorke's sweetest singing on the album and a Beatles-style build. Kent, in Mojo, heard melancholy jazz chords and Yorke insulting Blair in the voice of a sleepwalking drunk.

on stage

It was on the setlist before the record existed: first played on 17 June 2000 at the Arènes de Fréjus, one of 27 nights that year. The 2003 site's file on the song remembered that tour for Yorke at the piano and Colin Greenwood on upright bass. There were 33 more nights in 2001, and it has stayed: 224 nights in the archive, 10 of them as the opener and one as the closer.

It then went missing for 2,656 days, between Boston on 28 July 2018 and Madrid on 4 November 2025, and came back for 20 nights of that tour. In Madrid it was the only Amnesiac song in the encore; Angie Martoccio of Rolling Stone noted a camera fixed on Yorke's microphone, picking up every raised eyebrow and hand movement. The last night so far is Copenhagen, 16 December 2025.

incendies

Denis Villeneuve opened Incendies, his film of Wajdi Mouawad's play, on this 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 of getting it; the band gave it to him after seeing a rough cut. The film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and uses “Like Spinning Plates” as well.