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A scan of a sheet that seems to contain the earliest lyrical sketches for 'Scatterbrain', appeared in the Scrapbook section of radiohead.com:
Q: "How about all the attention you get on the road?"

Thom: "It's cool. I realised why I liked it when we started touring again, when we did the small tour in the summer, 'cause it felt really cool. It gets a bit scary when you become essentially what I call a moving target. There will be people that, simply before you open your mouth or walk on stage, will do anything, already, and ok, that's just weird. That's their fucking problem and I'm not gonna take responsibility for it, but it is there, and it is a bit intimidating and a bit scary, but, I guess that's just the way it is."
The following early draft of lyrics was added by Thom at the bottom of a lyric sheet that also featured the finished lyrics of the song. He used this sheet during the summer 2002 shows in Spain and Portugal, apparently he couldn't remember all the lyrics yet. At some point, this piece of paper was fortunately thrown into the audience:

somewhere I'm not in a force ten gale
swimming in an oil slick
pulled out by the tide
broke over lines, tonadoes eye.
going out o fmy mind, bad fucking vibess.
somewhere I cant hear this noise.
wildlife dying somewher with sunshine.
poisoned or poor no sharp pains or lumps.
a rare species being wiped out scattered far and wide.
eyes open him confused at a loss.
avoiding your gaze were the voices stop.
lightning fuse.
power cut.
on black ice, under floorboards.
just keeping afloat.
somewhwer Im not
just keeping afloat.
fingers dead in the ice
skin burning
watching the growths.
somewhere I cant
just change sides
bumper to bumper
nose to tail
always in my face
tv ariels bendt double, ina force ten gale.
watching someopne elses lights on the gangplank.
ive lost my train of thought, it happens all the time.
dont kno how old iam, tumbling down.
dont recognize us, thinking the wrong thoughts.
shoulkd maybe grow up
somwhere I dont give a fuck.
somwhere Im not under breaking oaks.
pulling up asphalt pulling up rocks.
the roots dig up the road
a blobk of ice
not in a rash doing bad dance.
more rain,sticking rain.
there used to be a field, now thers a lake.
somewhere im not, sandbagging.


Below the above lyrics, on the same sheet, Thom had also typed an excerpt from the novel 'V' by Thomas Pynchon, which probably had some influence on the song:

"It was one in the morning, a wind had risen and something curious too had happened; as if everyone in the city, simultaneously, had become sick of news of any kind; for thousands of newspaper pages blew through the small park on the way crosstown, blundered like pale bats against the trees, tangled themselves around the feet of Rooney and Rachel, and of a bum sleeping across the way. Millions of unread and useless words had come to a kind of life in Sheridan Square; while the two on the bench wove cross-talk of their own, oblivious, among them."
In 2003, the following image was used as a background for radiohead.com, in a page that featured the lyrics to 'Scatterbrain':

In 2003, the following three samples, called 'R100', 'R101' and 'R102', appeared in the Loophole section of radiohead.com. While the last of these is definitely connected to 'Scatterbrain', the relation of the other two is uncertain. They sound highly similar to the third one, though, in addition to preceeding it directly in number. They may have been taken from isolated tracks of Thom's multitrack demo for the song (unless 'Scatterbrain' was one of the songs he simply recorded into a dictaphone), but this remains speculation until that demo becomes available:
The live arrangement from the Iberian Tour is not much different from the released version, apart from a few bars of drums as an introduction.
This performance comes from August 1st 2002 in San Sebastian, Spain:
On March 30th 2003, the rough mix of the song was leaked and it represents the state of work from February. It is virtually identical to the finished mix:
Two further Loophole samples, 'R98' and 'R99' (in number directly preceeding the ones posted above in connection with Thom's demo), sound like could come from the studio version of the song:
Thom: "My absolute favourite type of weather is force ten gale. That's the happiest I am, in sort of gale, that might just take you up in the air and never come down again. And it was sort of... I mean, whatever came out lyrically, it was actually supposed to be a sort of celebration of this sort of storm, which is that... you know, I thrive on that. You know, I'm singing about a wild storm, but yet the music is very, very soft, you know, and really assuring. Like you're listening to it from outside the window. It's sort of a really lonely song as well. That's sort of the loneliest song on the record, I think."

Jonny: "It's very simple and sort of quite pretty, but there's something about the music for me, the chords for me, where it never quite resolves. It's never... it never really grounds, or something, never grounds itself. So it just sounds like it's always about to resolve, and in a way it never does, which makes it quite floaty and..."

Ed: "But in terms of the instruments that are played... that it gives it that warmth. Reminds me a bit... I always thought it was like Stevie Wonder, that Talking Book era, you get that warmth. And what he's doing a lot of the time is he doesn't resolve stuff. He does these beautiful chords and then they just... it's all wrapped up in the warmth of the recording and his great voice, but sometimes it just doesn't resolve, which is brilliant and why it's so different. We always thought of this as a sunday morning song, really. But Maybe it's not... Maybe it's a Radiohead sunday morning, which is, you know, a copy of the paper with some bad news on the front, yeah."
Thom: "One of my favourite things to do on 'Kid A' and 'Amnesiac' was to walk through empty landscapes. I became a rambler, and on this one I ended up walking through cities a lot. This song was born out of the fact that my favourite weather is windy weather, and that night there was a huge gale. I'd never seen anything like it. I could hear the roof of my house coming off, and had to get out. I'm getting my pastoral thing down. Like Wordsworth..."
Thom: "It's a really, really difficult song to describe where it came from, because on the surface it really was just an instant where those things happened. But at the same time there was a lot of other stuff going on that gave it significance. And my favourite type of weather in the whole wide world is extreme winds. I just get really excited. It is a bit dangerous. There was one time where… I have a house in the middle of nowhere and the house next door, the roof blew up and we just watched it and it was exactly like 'The Wizard of Oz'. It was fantastic. And this was a similar incident in the city. But it's kind of a love song as well, in a way."
In spring 2003, a remix titled 'Skttrbrain', created by Four Tet, was broadcast on radio. On November 17th 2003, this remix was released on the 2+2=5 single. On March 24th 2004, a longer version of the remix was released on the Japanese b-side compilation Com Lag. This version didn't fade out at the end, unlike the single version.
Another remix, called 'Skkatterwave', that uses Jonny's guitar part from 'Scatterbrain', was included in the fourth Radiohead.tv episode in 2003:
As a one-off, 'Scatterbrain' was played live acoustically by Thom and Jonny on september 29th 2003 for US radio station KROQ: