Main Index Pablo Honey The Bends OK Computer Kid A Amnesiac Hail to the Thief In Rainbows The King of Limbs A Moon Shaped Pool Thom Yorke Jonny Greenwood Ed O'Brien Colin Greenwood Philip Selway
Stanley and Thom drew a cartoon about genetically 'modified bears', that appeared in radiohead.com, and one of the images contains lyrics of 'Dollars And Cents' (you can view the whole cartoon here). Note that 'Dollars And Cents' appears right before 'Hunting Bears' on Amnesiac. As both tracks are related to this story the neighbourhood on the album might be more than coincidence:

This page appeared in radiohead.com during the Kid A period under the title 'INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITIES':

we are the dollars¢s£the pounds$the pence&were gonna crush you
little skulls. witless helpless eurokids you will learn eventually. all one big happy village complete with slaves. look after the pennies and fuk evrybody else. be constrictive in your analysis. we want none of your cnspircy shit here. quiet down. why dont you quiet down?
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A variation of the content above appeared in another page called 'SOUTHSEABUBBLE':


little skulls. witless helpless eurokids you will learn eventually. all one big happy village complete with slaves. look after the pennies and fuk evrybody else. be constructive in your analysis. we want none of your cnspircy shit here.

quiet

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GLOBAL
CON

Ed's Diary featured a number of entries that mention the song:
thursday, january 27th - friday, january 28th 2000
'dollars and cents' is a track that originated out of a 'jam' from copenhagen - it's good but because there was no arrangement, no musical decisions could be made on it.........well now it has an arrangement.....thom did some backing vocals and a bit of guitar, jonny put his string arrangement on, i did a little moog and the song is really going somewhere. will write something more substantial over the w/end.
monday, january 31st 2000
slow day as it often is on mondays. tape machine broke-down in the main room. thom and jonny did some drum programming.....more work in the other studio on 'dollars and cents' -- percussion and a guitar. not that interesting but the following might be....michael eavis knows how to throw the grandest and greatest party in the world.....glastonbury is the don of all festivals..........but alas we are not playing this year. there have been a few rumours flying around that we are, so we thought we'd better say something sooner rather than later. it would however be great to play it another year.................
friday, february 4th 2000
what an amazing day. fantastic string arrangements by jonny and what players. many many thanks are due to john lubbock(who conducted and organised) and the string players from the orchestra of st. john's, smith square. the whole session was the complete antithesis to the ok computer experience; firstly rather than de-camping to some london studio we used an old abbey near us with the most fantastic acoustics to record in. i think nigel was totally blown away by the whole sound of it. but most importantly john and the players were so enthusiastic about it all.....jonny has certain things that he wants/wanted to try out that aren't your usual string arrangaments. and rather than dismiss his ideas ( which is what happened on the ok computer session) they were open-minded enough to try them. john lubbock even handed over the conducting reins right at the end for jonny to try out an idea of his. there is no way that he would have been allowed to have done that at the abbey road session. brilliant players and people.

we needed this session after what has seemed an incredibly draining week.
monday, february 7th 2000
monday morning and everyone arrives looking completely fucked. got one more week before we take a week off to recharge. nigel wants to mix 'dollars and cents' now that there are strings on it. he goes upstairs to work on it. downstairs work continues on thom and jonny's drum thing from last week. late night worries and weird symbiosis going on. go on message board and someone asks us about 'innocents civilian'. so once we get off the web we decide to put up the master tape of it. can't find it anywhere which is incredibly strange. it's got to turn up.
tuesday, february 8th 2000
nigel got what seems like a good mix of 'dollars and cents'. more work on t+j's drum thing. did some playing this afternoon. upstairs at the moment nigel and thom are doing 'something' to kinetic. still can't find the master tapes to 'innocents civilian' and beginning to worry. worst case scenarios even being aired ie the u2 case when some of their rehearsal tapes went missing and ended up being sold as bootlegs.cozzie continues editing drums.
This page appeared in radiohead.com during the Kid A period under the title 'international police'. The original html file was created on september 27th 2000:

.WAF<1Ž4‹<1Ž4‹.WAF<üºó<üºó






dont jeopordise your position.

be constructive

bear witness

to yer blue.s

be cons
tructive

we
can use you. tr
ust no on
e. the w
a
lls hav
e eyes. , ba
st
ard

s,

fucking



A line from the above page also appeared in the Scrapbook section of radiohead.com:

This recording comes from the july 4th 2000 show in Berlin:
Robert Sandall: "Colin, what have you done on this record other than play the bass guitar?"
Colin Greenwood: "Oh, I've done nothing really [laughs], really I haven't done anything. I sort of drunkenly played other people's records over the top of what we've recorded and then said 'ooh, it should sound like that then', you know, on the Protools, or whatever. I took this Alice Coltrane record and played it over the top of the song called 'Dollars And Cents', which is on the next record. And Jonny wrote this beautiful string arrangement with the St. John's Smith Square, in a sort of Coltrane style, as a backing for it."
Q: "Still, you've got to accept that parts of both Kid A and Amnesiac are extremely challenging when first confronted. I couldn't make any sense of 'Dollars & Cents', for example...

Thom: "Well, that started out as a 10 minute piece of us mucking around, trying to do the Can thing. It just came out spontaneously. Lyrically, I like doing things like that - where whatever happens in the first take is what stays. When we did OK Computer all the vocals were first takes because (a) I couldn't do it again afterwards and (b) it was about being in the moment. The lyrics are gibberish but they come out of ideas I've been fighting with for ages about how people are basically just pixels on a screen, unknowingly serving this higher power which is manipulative and destructive, but we're powerless because we can't name it. At the time, the whole global marketplace thing was a major preoccupation of mine. I was reading a lot of stuff about it and it really become a massive part of my writer's block. It sounds daft now, but I couldn't see the point in writing about personal feelings when there were other, far more fundamentally important things to talk about."
Q: "OK. Um, is it fair to say that more of the tracks on Amnesiac are kind of based on a studio concept of, kind of, the band in a room together as opposed to each of you off on your own working on a piece of equipment?"

Colin: "I don't know. Um, uh, it's kind of a mixture again like the last record, really. There's live things on it. But our last, most live record was OK Computer where this record and Kid A has elements of live and studio but it was more studio-based as a record."

Q: "Uh-huh."

Colin: "I mean, like 'Dollars and Cents' is a live jam, but then that's a live jam that's been cut up."
Another model was Holger Czukay's jam/slice/splice productions for Can. 'Dollars & Cents', one of Amnesiac's highlights, was edited down from an 11 minute improvisation. "It was incredibly boring," laughs Yorke, "but it's that Holger thing of chop-chop-chop, making what seems like drivel into something coherent." Then orchestral strings - arranged by Greenwood and recorded in Dorchester Abbey - "were added to give it a sort of authority".
The performance from july 7th 2001 in Oxford was released on I Might Be Wrong - Live Recordings. This version is coupled here with low quality footage from the gig, which was seen on the big screens next to the stage:
This performance from July 30th 2001, dedicated to the Bush family, has Thom screaming "Murderers!" over the end of the song. The fan-shot video (only available from 0:33 onwards) is synced here to soundboard audio which has leaked from the I Might Be Wrong - Live Recordings project:
During the The King of Limbs period the song was not part of the regular touring and had its sole (and so far last) live performance at the Haiti benefit gig:
111. january 24th 2010 The Music Box Theatre at The Fonda Los Angeles, CA USA Link