The “mad” Radiohead song Thom Yorke wrote in “literally five minutes”
Though they found our ears during the 1990s, Radiohead was born at Oxfordshire’s Abingdon School in the mid-80s.
In their earliest incarnation, the band would seek refuge from belligerent teachers and fellow students in the sanctum of the school’s music room. Like many other haughty British private schools, Abingdon has been described as having a distinctly Dickensian atmosphere by its notable alumni, including comedian David Mitchell.
As perhaps expected from a group of geeky misfits in a Dickensian atmosphere, the members of Radiohead are also fond of their books. From their 1993 debut album, Pablo Honey, Radiohead were never short of inspired lyrics thanks to frontman Thom Yorke’s affinity for wordsmithery.
But perhaps what you might not expect is for those words to arrive like a flurry. For decades, Radiohead have rightly cultivated an image of themselves as creative innovators who refuse to be held to the expectations of anyone but themselves. But rather than positioning themselves as libertine poets, with a penchant for the dramatic, they are craftsmen, auditory artisans who chip away at the granite of an idea before leaving behind an abstractly perfect statue to gawk at. And they always have been.
Over the 1990s, Radiohead developed their own style of rock music at odds with the UK’s burgeoning Britpop era and that of grunge across the Atlantic. The band defied the odds to start creating music that deliberately went against the mainstream. Their early peak came with 1997’s OK Computer, an album that boasted adept musicianship and, crucially, Yorke’s sublime talent for lyricism as he mastered the art of social autopsy. As Britain began throwing pints in the air and demanding hefty choruses, Yorke and co went insular and created perhaps the best album of the year.
Following this landmark release, Radiohead felt they had exhausted rock innovation. An extensive touring campaign in support of OK Computer left Yorke somewhat disillusioned with rock music, and a hefty dose of writer’s block added to the befuddlement. At this point, he became exceedingly enamoured with experimental electronic music by the likes of Aphex Twin and Autechre and turned to Beat Generation literature to combat his writer’s block.
Kid A, the flawless and unique 2000 follow-up to OK Computer, married post-rock and electro in a harmony that suited Yorke’s strange, fractured lyrics inspired by William S. Burroughs’ famous “cut up” technique.
In 2001, Radiohead released Amnesiac, their fifth album comprised mainly of excess material from the Kid A sessions. Among its sprawling army of enveloping tracks was ‘Pyramid Song’, another track heavily influenced by historical literature. “The inception of the song was when we were in Copenhagen, and Thom went ’round the museum of culture,” bassist Colin Greenwood recalled in a 2000 conversation with Sundance. “And there was an exhibition of Egyptian underworld and tomb art. Of people being ferried across the river of death, I don’t know what it’s called in Egyptian mythology, and he was very affected by it, and he went back and sat behind the piano and wrote it.”
The track had been performed at several concerts in the run-up to Amnesiac and was initially titled ‘Egyptian Song’. In the lyrics, Yorke reflects his interest in the river of death in the Egyptian underworld by referencing Dante’s imaginary journey through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven in The Divine Comedy.
“That song literally took five minutes to write, but yet it came from all these mad places,” Yorke once told MTV of the song. “[It’s] something I never thought I could actually get across in a song and lyrically. [But I] managed it, and that was really, really tough. Stephen Hawking talks about the theory that time is another force. It’s [a] fourth dimension, and [he talks about] the idea that time is completely cyclical; it’s always doing this [spins his finger]. It’s a factor, like gravity. It’s something that I found in Buddhism as well. That’s what ‘Pyramid Song’ is about, the fact that everything is going in circles.”
If you wanted a single song to define a band, then ‘Pyramid Song’, acting as perhaps Radiohead’s most connected to their culture as a band, is about the best bet you will find. Taking on metaphysical themes with the same relish one might write a song about a fast car, and yet being able to pull it off as genuine is an impressive feat on its own. The fact that it arrived in five minutes is mind-blowing.
