Do you have a question you would like to ask Radiohead? If so, Pulk-Pull* can now post questions to the band’s SpinWithAGrin.co.uk web site. To submit a question, send an email to Pulk-Pull* at this address: spin@pulk-pull.org. Please also include your full name (first and last) and your country of residence.
Last but not least, keep in mind that not all questions submitted will be posted.
Following are four lines from “Go to Sleep,” song 5 on Hail to the Thief:
We don’t really want a monster taking over
Tiptoe around tie him down
We don’t want the loonies taking over
Tiptoe around tie ’em down
These lyrics indirectly reference Part One of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, wherein the protagonist, Mr. Lemuel Gulliver, visits and is imprisoned in the country of Lilliput. After a shipwreck, Gulliver washes up on the shore of Lilliput and falls asleep. While he is sleeping, the inhabitants, who are “not six inches high,” tie him down.
There is now a computer-animated video for “Go To Sleep (Little Man being Erased.),” the Radiohead’s next single from Hail to the Thief. This information was found via Climbing Up the Walls, a Radiohead news site.
In the video Thom Yorke sings on a park bench while business people rush hurriedly by, unaware of buildings exploding and then rebuilding themselves from their own rubble. Notably, when the buildings rebuild, their architectural style is radically different. Compare the two images below.
The first a neoclassical building exploding. The second image is of a building reconstructing itself into a more modernist structure.
The image below (courtesy of Bear Hunt) was used in the artwork for Amnesiac and can be found on a t-shirt for sale at W.A.S.T.E. Products.
The drawing above derives from the photograph below of AOL’s Steve Case (left) and Time Warner’s Gerald Levin (right):
This photograph was found and emailed to Pulk-Pull* by Koyder. More information on the merger, perhaps the largest business deal in history, is available in this CNET article and this BBC news report.
NOTE: this post was updated on June 29, 2007.
An excerpt from the August 2, 2001 issue of Rolling Stone:
Amnesiac‘s “Like Spinning Plates” is the track from another, unreleased song, “I Will,” run in reverse. “Thom learned to sing the backward melody forward,” says Colin. “You can hear what the words are, but they sound like they’re backward.”
In a related quote, Slavoj Zizek writes in On Belief (Routledge 2001):
In “The Curves of the Needle,” a short essay on the gramophone from 1928, Adorno notes the fundamental paradox of recording: the more the machine makes its presence known (through obtrusive noises, its clumsiness and interruptions), the stronger the experience of the actual presence of the singer–or, to put it the other way round, the more perfect the recording, the more faithfully the machine reproduces a human voice, the more humanity is removed, the stronger the effect that we are dealing with something “inauthentic” (44).
Following Adorno’s thesis above, and given the amount of technological intrusion between Thom Yorke’s actual voice and its final representation, the song “Like Spinning Plates” would be considered more authentic. Put another way, the song is more true to the unmediated human voice by acknowledging and foregrounding its unavoidable mediation in the recording process.
Partial lyrics from “A Wolf at the Door,” the last song on Hail to the Thief read:
get the flan in the face
the flan in the face
the flan in the face
dance you fucker dance you fucker
don’t you dare
don’t you dare
don’t you flan in the face
In an interview Q Magazine, (transcript available at At Ease), Thom Yorke mentions that “a friend of his threw a flan in cabinet minister Clare Short’s face.” The interviewer adds that “Clare Short was hit by a custard pie at Bangor University in March 2001.” The Guardian has biographical and contact information for Clare Short, as well as a brief profile. A photo of the flan in the face incident is available here. A description of the incident is given in this digest (you will need to scroll down to the entry titled “British Minister Gets Her Just Desserts”:
Just Desserts, or Dim ond Cwstard in Welsh, pied her when she visited Bangor in north-west Wales this evening. She was delivering a lecture on globalization at the University of Wales, when three local patisseristas presented her with custard pies in Short-crust pastry, made with fair-trade bananas and local organic ingredients. Ms. Short is believed to be the first government minister on earth to have received a special Cabinet Pudding.
The Just Desserts group is associated with the Biotic Baking Brigade.
Professor Frank Fenner received the Australian Government’s Prime Minister’s Science Prize in 2002, in large part for work on the myxamo virus, or myxamatosis (a word also often spelled myxomatosis).
The following is an excerpt from an interview with Q Magazine, (transcript available at At Ease [link broken as of 02.28.10]:
One day last summer, during a six-month hiatus from Radiohead, Thom Yorke decided to lavish treats on his son Noah. He bought the two year old some children’s DVDs, among them Bagpuss, the 70s TV series featuring a ragged pink and white cat who lives in a shop with friends Prof Yaffle, a doll called Madeline, and a troupe of mice.
When presented with this archive classic, Noah got up and walked out of the room, but Thom found himself sitting through all 13 instalments. Episode 2 — The Owls of Athens — caught his eye and in particular, a song called the Bony King of Nowhere.
‘It’s about this pipe-cleaner king with a bony arse who moans about the hardness and coldness of his throne,’ says Yorke. ‘So the mice scurry about trying to make him a comfy one.’
Naturally, you bite your lip as Thom tells you the story. But don’t worry. He knows. In fact, the resonance with his own life was so strong he decided this would be the title of the new Radiohead album. What’s more, he got on the phone to Bagpuss creator Oliver Postgate and asked if he’d make the video to the new single ‘There There.’
Postgate is 78, retired, and therefore declined. In the end, the Bony King of Nowhere was deemed too ‘prog’ by the rest of the band and the more declamatory Hail to the Thief was preferred. Even so, the pre-eminent rock seer of his generation is undeterred.
I’m telling you, there’s a lot in there. You could do a lot worse than get yourself the DVD of Bagpuss.’
The home page for Bagpuss is here. There is also information available on Bagpuss at this BBC site.
As noted in Message 122, fan sites have been asked to remove their lyrics and tabs archives. This situation is mentioned in this article in Internet Magazine and this Metafilter thread.