Thom: "It was sort of written initially... the demo I did of it for the others was very, very, very slow, indeed. And I kind of wanted it to keep that in, keep this sort of like chanting about it, really. And the words weren't really relevant, it was just these melodies going 'round and 'round against each other, you know. I'm not quite sure where that came from, but it's probably kind of a Mingus thing, one of my many Mingus hang-ups from another Mingus track. But then it just turned into this blimming, I don't know, rhythm fest thing. because it was obviously not gonna stay like that, I don't know... It's very, very old as well. I mean, it's pre-Kid A, the initial idea for the song. And the 'rain drops' section just came out of thin air, I don't know where the hell that came from, to be honest. Got no idea.
It was a series of... I mean, virtually everything on that track scarily is from one take. Except obviously the other vocals. I mean, all the instrumentation and everything. And when we were playing that live we were getting this insane response, and we didn't know... 'cause we went out and we tried out all the songs before we recorded them, you know. We went to Spain and Portugal and played all these things. And 'Sit Down. Stand Up.' always used to... I mean, it was such a joke, because, you know, the last 2 minutes of the song we just didn't know what we were doing. We didn't have a clue, you know. Jonny was like sitting there on his big AS machine, and all the lights flashing, Phil was trying to work out where he'd left the beat, and me and Ed are just like 'well, let's just keep singing 'raindrops', and hopefully people will think that it's coherent, even when it's not. And that's basically what we ended up with, really. But then we went into this sort of thing where we had this... there was one section where we basically cut it all into shreds and put it through the laptop and spat it back out, and kind of thought it was really too silly. But Nigel was like 'no, no, that's gonna go in'. And he was right, he was really good. It just switches into this other mode completely, like someone switched on the calculator and made everything quite rational, and then it's kind of not. I don't know. It's something I'm very proud of, but I just can't remember how the hell we got there, to be honest, like with most things on this record."
Phil: "That song was recorded in the first week of recording. That was actually... probably went through more processes than any other of the tracks on the album. We got the main performance down on the day it was recorded, and then we had this... it was brilliant, it builds and builds and builds. And you get to that section in the middle, which just explodes into this kind of electronica thing. And it was just fizzled out at that point. And fortunately it was just coming down to me doing this very, you know, beautifully played, of course, but it was a very lacklustre pattern. And so that section there... it was just trying to find something there, that maintained and built on that intensity, as we're going through."
Colin: "I think you're being a bit harsh on yourself about that, though, so... it's just one of those things where... we played it live before we recorded it and it was like, we got really big PA and it's like, we had a plot worked out. But then we took that plot into the studio, and we didn't record it how we'd been playing live in that section properly, whatever, with all these voices and stuff. Just didn't work out, so we changed it.
I like that song because of the James Bond beginning as well, with this electric piano sound, that Jonny plays, doing this Glockenspiel thing or whatever it is. And it sounds like the beginning of 'Diamonds Are Forever' or something."