‘Pyramid Song’: the Radiohead classic Thom Yorke initially thought sounded “really naff”
Every single song Radiohead has made in the past 20 years has felt like a new experiment. There’s never any point in trying to make the same thing over again, and Thom Yorke has made it his personal mission to switch things up at every turn, whether that means a chord sequence that he’s never tried before or making tapestries of sound that would leave listeners dumbfounded. He never claimed to be the best critic of his work, though, and when he first came up with an arrangement for ‘Pyramid Song’, he thought they had created something that sounded a bit hokey.
Granted, any song with a melody by the 2000s was off the table as far as Yorke was concerned. He had been wanting to move away from the sounds of OK Computer, and having a piece that was meant to be a tearjerker was not going to sit well with him anymore. So guitars were out, and the pianos and sequencers were in when it came time to make Kid A.
Even though the band’s fourth outing is one of their most cohesive album experiences, it’s hard to think of the album without the accompanying album Amnesiac. Both are their own entities, but Amnesiac tends to feel like an extension of what they had been working towards, especially with tracks like ‘Pyramid Song’.
Compared to the experimental angle of the last album, it’s almost impossible to count the beats in this song, especially when Yorke plays in a swing rhythm. Whereas most people can find the pulse of a piece based on the drum track, the one thing keeping it all together was exactly what horrified Yorke when hearing it back.
Since he had been listening to jazz prior to recording, Yorke wanted to use the same percussive angle he heard on the Charles Mingus track ‘Freedom’. While those trademark stomps on the Mingus song give the whole thing a distinct character, Radiohead wasn’t the kind of band that could pull that off effectively.
When talking about putting the track together, Yorke remembered the whole thing feeling a bit too stilted, saying, “’Pyramid Song’ is me being totally obsessed by a Charlie Mingus song called ‘Freedom’, and I was just trying to duplicate that, really. Our first version of ‘Pyramid’ even had all the claps you hear on ‘Freedom’. Unfortunately, our claps sounded really naff, so I quickly erased them.”
Even though it might have worked without the claps, it’s almost a cruel joke to play on the listener by not having any foundation for the track. While Yorke’s melody is pretty enough, it’s a nightmare for anyone trying to actually record a cover of the song, given how the tempo seems to be fluctuating at every turn.
At the same time, that might be the point of the piece. Since Radiohead was all about making songs that didn’t have a clear structure, this track feels like it’s floating in the air half the time before finally floating away towards the end. Radiohead were bound to go on even more sonic adventures after this, but ‘Pyramid Song’ is what happens when a rock band starts going beyond rock altogether.
