Steve Lamacq: "It's 'Everything In It's Right Place' from the new Radiohead album,
Kid A. And it's weird that the keyboard sound actually gives the song quite a lot of momentum on that one. And originally the same sort of keyboard was used on..."
Thom: "(clearing throat deliberately) Japan. They used to use it an awful lot to get all those wacky sort of like well, tin drum sounds."
Steve: "It's the first track on the album, but also with the keyboard sound it's almost.... it sounded, when I first listened to it, like the pulse, it feels like a pulse of like the patient re-awakening."
Ed: (laughs)
Thom: "I'd say that's a very good analysis. That's probably about the best I've heard actually, really."
Steve: "Is that why it's there?"
Thom: "Well, I mean, it was actually... it was the patient awakening, because really we weren't getting anywhere, and that was the first... I think that was the first thing that we did where everybody sat around going 'yeah, that makes sense, that's where we're heading' somehow or other, I'm not quite sure how, but..." [...]
Ed: "Yeah, I mean 'Everything In It's Right Place' was the first track that (to Thom), as you said, that was finished and it was like, 'yes this makes sense', and that was six months into... and that was June of last year."
Jonny: "Yeah, it's good, I'm kind of... it's sort of, you know, singing by proxy, because I can't, and so I'm stealing bits of Thom's singing and playing them back, you know, out of time, and out of tune even, as well, just how I would, and that's really good, obviously it's again all a bit up in the air every time we play it, but that's, you know..."
Steve: "It looks tremendously clever, from having seen the gig in Barcelona."
Jonny: "Oh no, it's just a couple of buttons."
Steve: "Is it?"
Colin: "And a finger."
Jonny: "And well, you know, sometimes it goes very well, and sometimes you get over-excited and wipe what the computer is holding, so there's nothing in there any more, and have to kind of push Thom back towards the microphone so I've got something still to use..."
Ed O'Brien: "'Everything in Its Right Place' was the first completed track. It was finished last summer, and it was Thom and Nigel. The song had been kicking around, we had tried it in Paris, we tried it in Copenhagen, in a band format, hadn't really worked. Thom and Nige were at Batsford House out in Gloucestershire, went away into the room for an evening, and worked on it. I remember coming later that night or the next morning, thinking 'This is just amazing, this is wonderful', you know, the potential of using this new technology, not resorting to guitars, and the whole thing of it. And it was, it was..."
Phil Selway: "It was very much a case of letting go."
Ed: "Yeah."
Phil: "For me, along with that. Ok, you hear there's a quality there, but along with that come all the insecurities of 'but I'm not playing on it!'"
Ed: "'I didn't play on this track!' [laughs] That's right."
Phil: "I mean, in ways, that song is brilliant, because it did bring out..."
Ed: "It forced the issue, immediately! And to be genuinely sort of delighted that you'd been working for six months on this record and something great has come out of it, and you haven't contributed to it, is a really liberating feeling. It's like, you could say 'Fuck! I've been working, I've been playing guitar for six months and everything I've done is crap!' [laughs]"
Paul: "From a listener point of view I'd have to say it's a good call. Because it really sounds like the beginning of something."
Ed: "Yeah, it definitely sets the tone of it. It's the key to this record. [...] I mean, I think 'Everything In Its Right Place'... I think it's really tense, and actually, in its own way, really emotional. But it doesn't have the obvious, huge crescendos that have existed on previous tracks and records of ours."
Nic Harcourt: "Can you remember which song from the new album first crystalised as a song, or maybe when you were sequencing the record, which song you first knew was going to be on the record in a particular place?"
Jonny Greenwood: "I think the song 'Everything In Its Right Place' was important because, unlike with
OK Computer, our last record, we were happy to leave parts of it empty, and I think in the past we've been too scared to leave sounds exposed or to have too much space around them, and we've been guilty of layering on top of what's a very good song or a very good sound, and hiding it, camouflaging it, in case it's not good enough, and 'Everything In Its Right Place' was one of the first songs that we actually realised is great, even though it's so sparse, so that was a very important song, and it also dictated how we sequenced the record, because we knew it had to be the first song, and everything just followed after it."
Colin Greenwood: "[Nigel] didn't think much of 'Everything In Its Right Place' when he heard it, he didn't think it was going to be any good, but then Thom was banging it out on an upright piano, you know, and then he and Thom like stayed up late one night in this big country house we rented out in England and did it on a proper keyboard and then Nigel used a scrubbing tool in Protools to like scratch the soundwaves, and made all these mad sounds that no-one had done before and it was amazing."
Chris Douridas: "Do you remember the... you know, in terms of the writing process, and the recording process, where the breakthrough came? Was it a... was there a moment of epiphany, or was it a series of smaller (laughs)... "
Ed O'Brien: "It was a series of small ones really. The first one I remember was the one when we were in Batsford and Nigel and... you know we’ve been working in a band context a lot of the time, and one night, Nigel and Thom sort of shut themselves away and did 'Everything In Its Right Place', and heard it the next day, and it was like that was a breakthrough, that was something that, you know, the sound of what they’d done was like, "yeah, that’s really, really... it’s different and it’s something that really excites us". So that was one."
