“Melatonin” is the title of song 6 on the Airbag / How Am I Driving? mini-album aimed at the USA (as the cover claims). Melatonin is a sleep-regulating hormone produced by the pineal gland. This article looks at its use to treat various health conditions, including jet lag.
A line of “A Punch-Up at a Wedding,” the eleventh song on Hail to the Thief, is:
a bully in a china shop
The common use of this phrase often substitutes “bull” for “bully.” The phrase’s entry in Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable reads: “A maladroit hand interfering with a delicate business; one who produces reckless destruction.”
There is now an audio and visual player available for Hail to the Thief. You can listen to songs from the new album. Using the + and – signs and the ?, users can apply and mix words to the blank album cover, in a manner resembling Thom Yorke’s lyric composition method described in message 114.
In an interview with NME (3 May 2003, page 27) Thom Yorke explains how he composed the lyrics for Hail to the Thief:
“From the album title … it’s possible to get a first impression of ‘Hail To The Thief’ as an overtly political album. It is, says Thom, not quite as cut and dried as that.
‘The point, which you chaps have failed to grasp, perhaps understandably,’ he says, ‘is that I was cutting these things out, and deliberately taking them out of context, so they’re like wallpaper.
‘Then, when I needed words for songs I’d be taking them out of this wallpaper, and they were out of any political context at all.'”
This method of composition mirrors that of dadaist poet Tristan Tzara. Not surprisingly, the following image explaining how to make a dadaist poem was culled from one of Radiohead.com’s previous incarnations:
You can read an essay on dadism by Tzara.
Today MTV2 played the video for “There There” at the top of every hour. Chris Hopewell is listed as the video’s director. A BBC interview with Hopewell is online and you can watch his short animated feature The Day of the Subgenius. Chris Hopewell has worked for the Bolex Brothers and Collision Films.
The first lines of “Scatterbrain,” the 13th song on Hail to the Thief read:
I’m walking out in a force ten gale
birds thrown around, bullets for hail
the roof is pulling off by its fingernails
The most common definition of gale is simply “wind.” In the OED, the third definition reads:
“1. a. A wind of considerable strength; in nautical language, the word chiefly ‘implies what on shore is called a storm’ (Adm Smyth), esp. in the phrases strong, hard gale (a stiff gale is less violent, a fresh gale still less so); in popular literary use, ‘a wind not tempestuous, but stronger than a breeze’ (J.). Also gale of wind. In restricted use, applied to a wind having a velocity within certain limits (see quots.).”
Today, in stricter meteorological terms, a gale’s force is measured on the Beaufort Scale. One of the most detailed accounts of the scale’s history is available here. As you can see comparing the above Beaufort Scale to the one maintained by the US National Weather Service Storm Prediction Center, a force ten wind is often termed a “storm” or a “whole gale.” Generally, however, these and various other versions of the scale agree that a force ten gale is a wind in which the sea turns white, trees can be uprooted and building damage occurs.
Historically, the definition of gale has shifted slightly as these entries in the OED indicate:
“1923 N. SHAW Forecasting Weather (ed. 2) 456 As a result of the investigation of 1905 we now classify winds with velocity above 75 miles per hour as hurricane winds, those with velocity between 64 and 75 miles per hour as storm winds, and those between 39 and 63 as gales. 1963 Meteorol. Gloss. (Met. Office) 109 Gale, a wind of a speed between 34 and 40 knots (force 8 on the Beaufort scale of wind force, where it was originally described as ‘fresh gale’), at a free exposure 10 metres (33 feet) above ground. Ibid., Statistics of gales refer to the attainment of mean speeds of 34 knots or over.”
In the OED, the second definition of the word, now obsolete, has two entries, the first is subdivided: 1a. Singing, a song; merriment, mirth; 1b. said of the voice of an animal; and 2. Speech, talk.
The following lines are from “A Punch-Up at a Wedding,” the eleventh song on Hail to the Thief:
the pointless snide remarks
of hammerheaded sharks
The traditional phrasing is “hammerhead shark” rather than “hammerheaded.” The adjective “hammer-headed”, according to the OED, was first used in Arthur Golding’s 1567 translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book VII, line 74.
Hammerhead sharks, according to this encyclopedia entry, are often observed “in inshore, brackish water.” The sharks are “both predators and scavengers.” As this page explains, only one of four hammerhead species is considered dangerous. The OED claims the first reference to hammerhead shark occured in an 1861 book titled British Fishes.
There is now an online pin map based on the art work for Hail to the Thief. Depending on where you place the pins, you are allowed to see clips from the video for “There There.”
Notice that the logo on the pinheads is identical to the logo discussed in message 100.
The scene of a cat wedding in the video for “There There” is excerpted below:
The similarity between this scene and Walter Potter’s The Kitten Wedding is mentioned in message 107. One notable difference, however, is that the wedding in “There There” is presided over by a raven (not pictured above), perhaps one of the same ravens that later chases Thom Yorke’s character at the video’s end. Another difference is eye color. The cats in “There There” all have yellowed eyes whereas Walter Potter’s kittens have dark eyes.
Various aspects of Radiohead are discussed in this Metafilter thread. Though it began as a discussion of Radiohead.tv, the discussion has turned to Radiohead as a middle-class music group.
