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
Possible lyrical links to this song showed up in notebooks from the OK Computer sessions, which were published as part of the OKNOTOK deluxe box set:

This page appeared in radiohead.com during the Kid A period under the title "ENTERTAINMENT FOR THE GENERALS!":

xrayok

investors!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! $1trillion moves everyday.
history shows. the royal we. guilt. hymns numbered on a
board. you were never there. its not my fault.

precluded.

mobiles chping
silence n th wd f sucides chping chping. vrythng chp chp chp. squlng fr ttntn
range rovers barbours preaching from lecterns.all an
act no blame attac coloured sweeties to rot your teeth with. harpies sit in the trees
eating/pecking away - the wood of suicides

outta juice
baggage
lame mule

repeat parrot fashion

The line 'women and children first' appears in this page from the Kid A era version of radiohead.com, titled 'gladiamanothing':







lets see all the blue collared boot boys sweat+whine
police on hoorsback broken bones
we sit in the back while no-one drives
two headed monsters
three headed brides
nobody is free to do what they want
waited on hand and foot
the worlds best selling drug
comrades with mobile phones
the illegitimate bastard sons
crawling out from under stones
daddy daddy ive come home
a woman flutters her eyelashes in washington
and bombs rain down in sudan
women and children first
carry on smiling
and the world will smile with you
ill laugh my nuts off the day the banks collapse
im alright jack
the day the banks collapse
in bloody palestine
made in china
the amazing sound of the killing hordes
human time bomb
we want to see them beg for life
chop off the fingers in the pie
i want to see you smile again
the day the banks collapse
the puce synthetic voice that says were fine
limitless scenarios
limitless channels
on which to watch
who was right
and who was wrong.
who was right
and who was wrong.
who was right
and who was wrong.

 

'Idioteque' contains samples from Paul Lansky's 'Mild und Leise' and Arthur Krieger's 'Short Piece', both of which Jonny found on a compilation LP from 1974 called 'Electronic Music Winners':

This is an excerpt from 'Mild und Leise' that contains the section sampled in 'Idioteque' and a little more after that to give an impression of what the rest of the piece is like:
Ed's Diary featured a number of entries that seem to regard the making of 'Idioteque', though this can't be verified yet:
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.................
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.
thursday, february 24th 2000
more work on 'cuttooth'...........jonny did his guitar thing...feedback,backwards guitar.......it was good to hear. it sometimes seems as though not much guitar has been played so far, which is probably bollocks. there has been a fair amount, but in the quest for different sounds we haven't first turned to the trusted and tried six-string. thom did some work on a track upstairs, which sounded great. lots of editing on the computer to make the track in question more coherent. am i sounding boring?....apologies, just tired that's all....on to thursday...
The line "take the money and then run" can be found in two pages of the hidden Kid A booklet [click to enlarge]:
This piece of artwork, that also had been used for the cover of the hidden booklet of Kid A, appeared in the Dead Children Playing book that accompanied the exhibition of artwork that Stanley held at Iguapop Gallery in Barcelona in 2006 (click image for full size):

The line 'the ice age is coming' can be seen in this poster:

In the files for the Kid A Mnesia Exhibition, there are a few oddities related to this track. One file labeled "Computer Beat" has some extra drum beats presumably from Jonny. This has an eerie keyboard line, which is also in another file.
The exhibition also contains an instrumental version of the track (though missing certain elements, such as percussion), and the full version of the drone credited to Ed that links this track and 'Morning Bell'.
In late november 2000, around the time the band was finishing Amnesiac, Radiohead recorded a 'live in the studio' version of the song at AIR Studios in London for the Evening Session on BBC Radio 1, which was subsequently aired on december 14th. This performance was also filmed in black and white for a webcast (directed by the Vapour Brothers) and in color for a TV promo (directed by Grant Gee). The webcast version also appeared in Episode 2 of Radiohead.tv and was released on The Most Gigantic Lying Mouth Of All Time:
For a long while during the Kid A sessions, he was totally uninterested in melody, just into exploring texture and rhythm. The result was tracks like Kid A's 'Idioteque', which sounds like two-step Garage with a PiL/"Death Disco" twist, but is actually "an attempt to capture that exploding beat sound where you're at the club and the PA's so loud, you know it's doing damage".
Steve Lamacq: "Oh, I see, oh good, oh right, fair enough. But if I was in A&R that would have been my choice as a single, strangely, but only today, because I've changed my favourite track three times over the course of the last two weeks, learning to live with this record."
Thom: "You're implying that an A&R man has an imagination."
Steve: "There must be someone somewhere who does."
Thom: "Yeah?"
Steve: "Stop raising your eyebrows up and down like that, it's putting me off. I've got written down in my notes here, because it's got this slightly industrial feel to it, but I've just got 'it's like standing in a high street except the high street is a foreign land that makes no sense, but every sort of sense at the same time, p.s., it's a land where the lottery rules' What do you make of this? You wrote it."
Thom: "Ok, well, ermm, right, this is... my excuse for it, right is that... I wanted the... on the record to be at least one track that... you go out to a nightclub, and you dance until your head fell off and the rest of the lyrics really... what I wanted to do was to do what I thought was the most uplifting... out of a box piece of music that we could possibly do..."
Steve: "Out of a box?"
Thom: "Yeah."
Steve: "You have been learning the lingo."
Thom: "That's right, man, yeah, it's like 'wack'."
Steve: "Yeah, out of a box, alright."
Thom: "Err yeah, it's out of the box... where was I? Oh yeah, the words... but actually the words were supposed to to be basically all the things that actually keep me awake at night, you know, you see I can't sleep at the moment."
Steve: "Yeah."
Thom: "Well these were the things... each line in this song, they're the lines that kept me awake at night for about a month."
Steve: "Really?"
Thom: "Yeah, so they're all... but they're out of the hat, which is even more worrying."
Steve: "So these are lines out of a box, out of the hat..."
Ed: "In your head."
Steve: "In your head."
Ed: "On your head."
Thom: "These were lines which were in my head at some point, but I think your analysis is probably better, really, because I'm really not probably the best judge."
Jonny Greenwood: "The starting point for that was trying to build a drum machine out of very old style synthesizers, kind of using the same things that I suppose the Roland technicians would have had in 1978 or whatever, to decide how to make something sound like a snare drum out of white noise and how to create the sound of a bass drum, a kick drum out of filters. We basically built a drum machine, and I played a record on top, at random, and had a radio playing, and was just trying to generate all this chaos over this drum pattern. And then Thom cut it into sections, and ended up having a sample of the record I was playing, which is this compilation of electronic composers. They had some competition in 1972 to see who was writing the best modern electric music in a classical style, and it's been a very interesting process, because I wanted to track down the composer to tell him we'd done it, and ask permission and stuff, and at that point he'd been 18, 19, and was in college, and no-one knew what he was doing today, and it turns out he's a professor at Princeton, professor of music. We've been corresponding, and he came and saw the show, and was very excited and was describing the songs in a very interesting way, and he really likes what we do."

Colin Greenwood: "And he said that if you want to come for an interview to finish your music studies..."

Jonny: "...Princeton's the place."

Colin: "Yeah. [laughs]"
Mark Russell: "Now there are a couple of samples on the album, which are quite unusual, one by Paul Lansky, where did you find that?"

Jonny Greenwood: "The true story behind that is that I built a drum machine out of old components, something just generating white noise, and something that was kind of opening and closing the white noise. It was sounding quite good, and I had a rhythm going, but I needed some chaos. And so I shamelessly put on some records on the turntable and tuned a radio in and just wanted to fill it up, because it was far too empty. And I gave Thom a recording of this, about half an hour long, and he cut it into pieces, and repeats it, repeats it, in sections. There's this melody in it, that's really beautiful, and I couldn't remember how I made it, 'cause I was playing a keyboard as well. And I thought 'yeah, it must just be something, you know, I played'. It's only four notes. And it was only a few days later when we'd finished the song and spent, you know, days on it, that I put the same record back on and these four notes came out just clearly... And so I had to track down Paul Lansky. And the record was interesting, because it was made in 1974, when he was a student, and I wasn't sure what he was doing now, I didn't even know if he was still, you know, a musician or anything. This was a student competition record - who can make the best electronic music in 1974. And then I found out he was at Princeton, and a professor of music. So I wrote to him, and explained what I'd done, you know, a bit embarrassed, and sent him a copy of the recording. And luckily he liked it, or, you know, liked what we'd done with his music.”"

Colin Greenwood: "And he came to the show in New York..."

Jonny: "Yeah."

Colin: "...as well, didn't he? And he said if you wanted to... - 'cause he found out that you hadn't finished your music studies, 'cause we'd stolen you in a rusty white van to do a tour when we started, and you were in your first term at Brookes - so he said if you wanted to continue your studies at Princeton, yeah, he'd give you a favourable interview. [laughs]"
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:
A line from the song appeared in the 'scrapbook' section of radiohead.com in 2004:

'Idioteque' was soundchecked on august 24th 2008 in L.A. at the Hollywood Bowl. In this recording of it by atease member hoserama, Thom makes some rather entertaining remarks towards Jonny and also goes into 'Hey Ya!' by Outkast:
Live performance #239 during the making of The King of Limbs:
239. june 25th 2010 Glastonbury Festival Pilton UK Link
Live performances #240 to #267 during the touring for The King of Limbs:
  The King of Limbs tour (1st half) 09/'11 02/'12 march 2012 april 2012 05/'12 june 2012
Everything In Its Right Place [23] 28 29 29 01 03 05 07 09 11 13 09 11 14 18 29 31 01 05 08 10 11 13 15
The National Anthem [11] 28 29 27 07 13 11 29 31 01 03 05
How to Disappear Completely [5] 11 15 09 01 15
Idioteque [28] 27 29 01 03 05 06 07 09 11 13 15 09 11 12 14 17 18 21 29 31 01 05 06 08 10 11 13 15
Live performances #268 to #296 during the touring for The King of Limbs: