Jazz, Ancient Egypt and Stephen Hawking: the strange story of Radiohead’s ‘Pyramid Song’
It seems unbelievable now, but there was a time when Radiohead was stuck in a one-hit-wonder rut. Scoring a top ten winner from the word go with their debut single ‘Creep’, its instantaneous success reaped serious commercial gain stifled with creative paralysis, the audiences attending their shows caring for little else of their set save for their grunge-flecked smash, crowds even spotted leaving the venue after “their Scott Walker song” had been performed.
Pouring their disdain as living jukeboxes into the acerbic ‘My Iron Lung’ and seeking new sonic territory of electronic sheen to their sophomore LP, The Bends, Radiohead quashed any suspicion of their limited shelf-life with an acclaimed record that provided a much-needed antidote to the nostalgic dead end of Britpop’s ‘Cool Britannia’ theatre.
After reaching their 1990s creative apex with the pre-millennial anxiety of OK Computer, rock music suddenly felt passé. Seeking musical guidance anywhere that didn’t feature a guitar, frontman Thom Yorke immersed himself in Warp Records’ electronica back-catalogue, avant-garde jazz, 20th-century classical music, and pioneering computer music from American professor Paul Lansky. Recording their much-awaited follow-up across 18 months with longtime producer Nigel Godrich, the Kid A sessions delivered enough material that the band briefly toyed with the idea of a double album.
Skipping the conventional marketing campaign for Kid A, their following single to ‘No Surprises’ was 2001’s transcendental cosmic gem ‘Pyramid Song’. One of the most majestic cuts in their entire output, Amnesiac‘s lead single offered a stirring and heady exploration of mortality and the afterlife with a bold arrangement of eerie strings, jazzy drum fills, and a spectral coating of electronic effects that lift the listener to a sincerely otherworldly realm. As is Radiohead tradition, ‘Pyramid Song’ had been floating around their sets for a while, its live debut at the 1999 Amsterdam Tibetan Freedom Concert.
“The chords I’m playing involve lots of black notes. You think you’re being really clever playing them, but they’re really simple.” Yorke told Mojo in 2001. “For ‘Everything In Its Right Place’, I programmed my piano playing into a laptop, but ‘Pyramid Song’ sounded better untreated. ‘Pyramid Song’ is me being totally obsessed by a Charlie Mingus song called ‘Freedom’ and I was just trying to duplicate that, really.”
Yorke wasn’t just raiding his jazz collection for inspiration. Visiting an Egyptian exhibition in Copenhagen during a two-week break in 1999, its study of burial customs and funerary rituals sparked a strange marriage with one of the most celebrated contemporary scientists. “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,” Yorke told MTV.
He added: “Stephen Hawking talks about the theory that time is another force. It’s a fourth dimension and the idea that time is completely cyclical; it’s always doing this (spins 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.”
For those who haven’t read A Brief History of Time, Hawking posits that the universe may be cyclical and is forever contracting to a dense, hot state akin to the ‘Big Bang’. This fluctuating expanse from other to disruption wrought from constant contractions would mean an ambiguous thermodynamic arrow of time, the only kind that could support intelligent life. Such chin-stroking fodder imbues ‘Pyramid Song’ with deeply alluring and elegiac energy, a song among Radiohead’s dazzling body of work that transports like nothing else they ever cut.
