“Pissed in the club”: The night out that inspired Radiohead to write ‘Let Down’
This past week, Radiohead earned only their fourth entry into the Billboard Hot 100.
Even for a band as resolutely uninterested in the trappings of fame as Radiohead, that seems a little light. They’re one of the biggest and most influential outfits around, yet there are a handful of individual albums that have more hit singles on the Billboard Hot 100 than they do. One can’t imagine that the band are losing sleep over that, but even miserablists like them probably welcome another song of theirs entering the charts.
Which is where things get weird. A new Radiohead single charting in the Billboard Hot 100 would probably be cause for music nerds all over the world to do backflips in sheer joy, but no. Cancel the amateur gymnastics because, as we all know from a cursory glance at any singles chart you care to mention, that’s not how music works these days. It’s not a new Radiohead single; just like most songs on the charts these days, it’s a song from decades ago.
Joining the likes of ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’ and Black Sabbath’s ‘Paranoid’ on the charts is their classic song ‘Let Down’ from OK Computer, released a cool 28 years ago. Two years before the birth of Audrey Nuna, one of the vocalists of Huntr/x’s ‘Golden‘, the current number one single on the Billboard Hot 100. It wasn’t even released as a single back then, yet since it had a viral moment on TikTok, it’s now getting the mainstream recognition it deserves.
So, what inspires a song like that? After all, it comes from OK Computer, a famously gloomy album mainly inspired by how the tour for the previous album, The Bends, exposed them to (then) modern culture that the entire band despised. Combine that with the fact that same tour nearly drove singer and songwriter Thom Yorke to despair through sheer anxiety and depression, one can only imagine that a song like ‘Let Down’ comes from the same stock.
What inspired ‘Let Down’ by Radiohead?
After all, in a famously misanthropic discography, ‘Let Down’ is a particularly misanthropic song. A feat that stands out like a “particularly sad” song by The Cure, or a “particularly loud” song by Napalm Death. Yet it’s true, for ‘Let Down’ sees Yorke yowling ‘Crushed like a bug in the ground / let down and hanging around” over admittedly some of the most beautiful guitar riffs the band ever recorded. Things do get a little more upbeat with lines like “Shell smashed / juices flowing / wings twitch / legs are going” but only when you realise it scans perfectly with the pre-chorus to ‘Call Me Maybe‘. Enjoy!
So, where does a song like this come from? A particularly long, particularly dark night of the soul on a tour bus going down a particularly soul-crushing motorway? An argument with your bandmates that cuts just a little too deep? Striking out with that really hot bassist you met in Milan and knowing you’ll never meet them again? Nope. According to an interview with Select magazine, this was a song that came from one of the most un-Radiohead sources imaginable.
Yorke begins by saying “I was pissed in a club” which is already a hilarious mental image, but he goes on to say, “I suddenly had the funniest thought I’d had for ages, what if all the people who were drinking 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 makes a lot of sense that that’s the funniest thought that Thom Yorke has had in ages.
However, the thought did find its way into the song pretty much verbatim. “The emptiest of feelings / disappointed people / Clinging onto bottles”. A surreal, weirdly funny yet tragic image that suits one of the most affecting songs in Radiohead’s back catalogue perfectly, one that more than deserves its recent surge in popularity, from The Bear to TikTok to the charts.
