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One of Thom Yorke’s pseudonyms is Tchock. While the name seems relatively nonsensical, it may be related to the musician Tchok who produced an album titled Kinetik (a name that recalls the Radiohead b-side “Kinetic”).

Less likely alternatives: Tchok is the Russian word for old copper or zinc coins of Manchuria and Indochina. Tchok also means indigo plant in Korean.

In an early scene of the documentary Meeting People is Easy, we see Thom Yorke frontally from an audience member’s perspectiveóthe band is onstage also, but out of camera range. Pointing his microphone to the audience, he forgoes singing the final lyrics to “Creep,” letting the audience do so instead. The mournful closing line, “I don’t belong here,” takes on special meaning given that the speaker, with the audience singing in his place, does not need to be present. “I don’t belong here,” is an observation on the surface, but also a statement of desire, a desire to not be wherever “here” designates.

Later in the movie, we see Thom Yorke from behind, singing alone with an acoustic guitar to an empty auditorium. The song he performs here would later become “How to Disappear Completely.” This scene and the one described above form negative images of one another. I’m not here, this isn’t happening. The lyrics we hear Yorke singing, unlike “Creep”, assert that the speaker is not hereóthe speaker is a spectral entity, rising above the moment, escaping it. Whereas in “Creep” the speaker can only pine for an escape that, by song’s end, never comes.

Late capitalism, Slavoj Zizek writes in The Fragile Absolute, has introduced us to “a breathtaking dynamics of obsolescence.” As you will find on this site, many links to older materials on previous incarnations of Radiohead web sites (older=one to three years) are out of date. The links, un-updated, witness this breathtaking dynamics of obsolescence. To update the links would be a vain effort to efface the inevitable: mutability.

Nevertheless, the previous incarnations are fortunately archived here at Beryl Tomay’s followmearound.

Two lines of the refrain for “Life in a Glass House” reads:

Well of course I’d like to sit around and chat
Well of course I’d like to stay and chew the fat

According to the OED to “chew the fat” means to discuss a matter, especially complainingly, or to reiterate an old grievance; to grumble; to argue; to talk or chat; to spin a yarn. The phrase is of uncertain origin. One possiblity: as a child growing up in 40s and 50s America, my father was occasionally given pieces of pork fatback rind to chew on his way to school. The phrase of the song’s title has an interesting history dating at least as far back as Chaucer.

In an interview with Kurt Loder, Thom Yorke referenced Heaven’s Mirror: Quest for the Lost Civilization by Graham Hancock and Santha Faiia. Here’s an excerpt from the interview:

Yorke: … all along the way, while we’re making the record [Kid A] and recording, all the time we were away, I just kept meeting people that were talking about it. Talking about the fact that maybe human beings are defunct and maybe human beings eventually sow the seeds of the next higher form of life. They’re not quite sure on how to deal with it yet, but they have already started doing it. And I’m reading this really wacko book about stars and pyramids as well.

Loder: What is it called?

Yorke: God, what’s it called? I can’t remember what it’s bloody called. Where’s my bag?

Loder: About stars and the pyramids?

Yorke: Yeah. Where’s my knapsack?

Loder: Just show us everything in your knapsack. That would be good.

Yorke: It’s all right, ’cause you won’t use any of this. You’ll edit it out. OK, it’s got a terrible cover. Just ignore the cover. It’s called “Heaven’s Mirror: Quest For The Lost Civilization,” by Graham Hancock and Santha Faiia.

Loder: [Reading cover] It’s now a major television series?

Yorke: Yeah. I saw it while we were working, and it slightly freaked me out. It’s a book that has this theory that there are a lot of ancient sites around the world that pyramids and temples are built on which correlate exactly with stars in the heavens and correlate with things like the Mayan calendar, which is like more accurate than our calendar and takes the wobble in the earth into account. A lot of it is about the idea that in all ancient cultures and myths there is a flood, and before the flood there was a higher form of civilization, a higher form of life on Earth that that was wiped out. And in order to tell us that they were here, they left all this stuff. So, within all this, with the symbolism stuff, they indicate that our period is coming to a close and the next period is about to start.

Loder: It’ll be like an AI period?

Yorke: Well, I don’t know yet. I’m booking my condo on the moon, actually.

Line 12 of “Bones” from The Bends reads:

And I used to fly like Peter Pan

Peter Pan is a fictional character that first appeared in Sir James M. Barrie’s novel The Little White Bird in 1902.

The final line of “Like Spinning Plates” reads:

Our bodies floating down the muddy river.

Line 6 of “How to Disappear Completely” reads:

I float down the Liffey.

Again, a body floating down a river. In James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, Anna Livia Plurabelle, the wife of H. C. Earwicker, the major male character, personifies the River Liffey, which flows from the Wicklow Mountains to the Irish Sea. On old maps, the Liffey was called “Anna Liffey”, from the Irish Gaelic word “amhain” for river. See also message 10.

Read the original New York Times book review for Finnegan’s Wake here.

Two lines of the song “The Bends” read:

They brought in the CIA, the tanks and the whole marines,
To blow me away, to blow me sky high

The CIA is, of course, the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA refers to itself numerous times on its web site as an “independent” and “separate” agency. They maintain a distinct information page for children.

A possible antecedent for the pronoun “they” in the two lines quoted above occurs earlier in the lyrics:

But who are my real friends
Have they all got the bends

Here, “they” refers to the speaker’s friends. Are they, the friends, the CIA? Perhaps the song is, as Greenplastic claims, ridiculous.

Read biographical information about Humphrey Lyttelton, the jazz trumpeter who plays on “Life in a Glass House.” Lyttelton presents BBC Radio 2’s Best Of Jazz and Radio 4’s I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue. The session with Radiohead, he claimed, was “heavy.”