Paranoid Android
"Basically an excuse to weld loads of half-finished songs together,
'Abbey
Road' style. It's Radiohead, pissed and having a party.
I wasn't there
when it was all stuck together - I'd been sent to bed to sleep it
off.
What's it about? The fall of the Roman Empire."
Subterranean Homesick Alien (Uptight)
"Ah, this is us desperate to be Miles Davis on 'Bitches Brew'.
It's got a
groove. And it used to be called 'Uptight.' That's it,
really."
Exit Music (For a Film)
"We wrote this for Romeo and Juliet. I saw the Franco Zeffirelli
version
when I was 13 and I cried my eyes out, because I couldn't understand
why,
the morning after they shagged, they didn't just run away.
It's a song
written for two people who should run away before all the bad stuff
starts.
A personal song."
Let Down
"I was pissed in a club, and I suddenly had the funniest thought
I'd had
for ages - what if all the people who were dirnking were hanging
from the
bottles... if the bottles were hung from the ceiling with string,
and the
floor caved in, and the only thing that kept everyone up was the
bottles?
It's also about an enormous fear of being trapped."
Karma Police
"This is really schizophrenic, isn't it? There's that huge
personality
change halfway through. Wait until you see the video!
We're making the
whole LP into a film, commissioning it song by song."
Fitter Happier
"The others were downstairs, 'rockin'', and I crept upstairs and
did this
in ten minutes. I was feeling incredible hystreria and panic,
and it was
so liberating to give the lyrics to this neutral-sounding computer."
Electioneering
"I was thinking of the Poll Tax riots when I wrote this - the moment
when
the horses broke through the barriers and everyone started smashing
windows. It's also from watching too many MPs on telly - you
just get that
feeling of, Whoah, I've seen this once too many times."
Climbing Up The Walls
"This is about the unspeakable. Literally skull-crushing.
I used to work
in a mental hospital around the time that Care In The Community
started,
and we all just knew what was going to happen. And it's one
of the
scariest things to happen in this country, because a lot of them
weren't
just harmless... It was hailing vilently when we recorded this.
It seemed
to add to the mood."
No Surprises
"The first song we recorded - that, erm, haunting, child-like guitar
sound
set the mood for the whole album. We were going for that 'Pet
Sounds'
vibe.
Lucky
"Everyone knows about this one. Recorded for War Child, unplayed
by Radio1.
Who's 'Sarah'? No one I know. It's just my favourite
name."
The Tourist
"Ah, one of Jonny's songs. The lyrics came from being in a
beautiful
square in France on a sunny day, and watching all these American
tourists
being wheeled around, frantically trying to see everything in ten
minutes
You know: We've got to be in Pairs tomorrow morning! And then
I saw this
old bloke on telly, saying that he couldn't work out why the world
had got
so fast and in a hurry. I just had an image of him standing
on a street
corner, watching the traffic hurl by."