You

manic hedgehog to chipping norton

“You” goes back to On a Friday, the band's name before Radiohead, and to the Manic Hedgehog demo cassette of October 1991. When Parlophone put out the Drill EP in May 1992 they used that demo recording rather than make a new one. For Pablo Honey the band recorded it again at Chipping Norton with the producers Sean Slade and Paul Q. Kolderie, and some of the words changed on the way; the 2003 version of this site printed both sets, and heard in them a love song of an obsessive kind.

It opens the album, with chords that swap between major and minor under one melody and a time signature that shifts in mid-phrase.

first song, then last

From its first night, in Oxford on 31 October 1991, until Pachuca on 30 October 1994, it opened the show more often than not, fifty-five times in all, and in 1993 alone it was played on sixty nights. Then it moved to the other end of the set, and between 1994 and 1997 it closed the show 21 times. After New York in April 1998 it was gone for two years, came back in Thessaloniki on 25 June 2000, and the archive's latest is Salamanca on 7 August 2002.

the apollo encore

At the home-town show at the Oxford Apollo on 12 February 1995 it was the first song of the encore. John Harris, reviewing the night for NME, found the teenagers at the back of the stalls screaming loudest as it started. White light flooded the stage, and Thom Yorke went into a bow-legged, jerking dance, like a man being electrocuted.