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
The phrase "Lundy, Fastnet, Irish Sea" was probably taken from a Shipping Forecast of the weather of the part of the sea that is close to Thom's second home in south-west England:

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

lundi-fastnet-irish seas. pharisle pharoah hebrides. knives out. catch da mouse. squash his head. put him in the pot. no sense it letting it go to wlud odsgfocggsg scygsdycoucgoudycgoucghoopfacedowninthecarpetifievergetupagainy
gcygdscygsdygxdouxycuocgscgcygscgscgsocgsodcf.


n o s o ulllaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
aahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
hhhhhhhnosenseinlettingitgo.




(ventriloqist)

The title phrase appears in another page, titled 'N I G H T F A L L I N G'. The original html file was created on january 4th 2000:

.WAF


 

 

 

instructions for use:
1 printout.
2 cut into flashcards line by line and wave from the public gallery.
3 produce at random out of a hat.
4 wear headphones or mobile earpiece.

chancey gardner

chattering classes

roundup

trapped like rats

inexplicable

exocet

what have i done wrong?

a waking nightmare

carpal tunnel syndrome

most paper money has traces of cocaine

most paper money has traces of blood

compromise

there is nothing i can do to make you understand

look out the window what do you see?

lost in woods

not a single word

albatross

watch him skwirm cant decide

never

cliches fall from mouth like spit

possibly california

packt up like sardines in crushtin box

gotobed

shot in the head

stuck in the mud

lost in woods

look at him go

only window shopping.

nothing.

something.

everything.

something.

nothing.
This page appeared in the Kid A era version of radiohead.com under the title 'little ones':





you are living in a fantasy world
you are living in a fantasy world
you are living in a fantasy world
you are living in a fantasy worldyou are living in a fantasy world
you are living in a fantasy world
you are living in a fantasy world
you are living in a fantasy world.

 

Further lines appeared in another page called 'ivehadmyfill':








the sky is green
brain overload im so afraid
the trap door opens
i spiral down
down
down

 

This image from the Kid A Mnesia Exhibition files contains more early lyrics, including a connection to 'Like Spinning Plates':
A few entries from Ed's Diary mention the song:
thursday, july 22nd 1999
thom arrives & plays a new song on the acoustic. sounds great but has no name, so now on referred to as the song with no name. we move on to "lost at sea/in limbo" after only nine months work its starting to sound like its getting somewhere. good in fact. The others sound ok too.( everything, everyone/the national anthem). highlight of the day is attempting 3 part harmonies on "neil young *9"- not the harmonies themselves, but phil cracking up because he feels a bit like that drummer from the eagles. a fucking brilliant rehearsal. its great to be in our band.
friday, july 30th 1999
spend the first 3hrs on 'up the ladder'. things are happening; jonny brings in the 'missy eliot' chord??!! thom starts singing lyrics from another song, cozzie comes with a catchy riff for the chorus and phil is ..funking. with that going on its very easy for me. working through something is such a cliche but if youre in the right frame of mind its so true. finish by playing "lost at sea/in limbo" , "optimistic", "c-minor song". it would be great to have another look at "you and whose army?" next week, and rescue it for the 'lets leave it for a while' pile. plank's not here today as he's in Lobo, Norway with Mike Scott- they have no nights in summer.
tuesday, august 3rd 1999
start by working on 'lost at sea'. thom thinks weve already recorded the definitive version whilst in paris. not sure about that, mind you he admits that thats because of the way hes singing it (which hes only done with a tape alone whilst driving). i really like this new version, as much as anything for its relentlessness and energy. anyhow move onto a new song 'cuttooth' - its got a 'neu' thing about it - long and hypnotic.... finish with attempting to rescue 'you and whose army'...
Undated (mid-november 1999), posted on december 1st 1999
-i've tried to write something about what we've been doing in the last five weeks - there have been the day-by-day accounts which have been of the 'we did this and then we did that' variety..........all incredibly boring to read. then there have been a couple of 'essays' written whilst stoned late at night, only to be re-read the next morning. pretensious old tosh. all have been discarded. it's easy to get extremely self-conscious doing this. we're in london at present and nigel is mixing; he has been for three days. which means that we have actually finished six or so tracks. this has been our life for the last five weeks - we had a list of about ten songs which was then further narrowed down to six. they are definitely different....................there's an eight piece brass ensemble in a charles mingus style on one - eight 'jazzers' came down for the day and blew their stuff all over 'everyone - the national anthem'. they were fantastic............thom and jonny conducted. what a day. there's 'optimistic', there's another which started off as a thom doodle on the 505........there's also the paris version of 'lost at sea'.........the batsford 'morning bell'.it is different. but that's what we do. what has also become evident is that the summer panic that led to two months rehearsal may have been a little premature.....or at the very least a little on the hysterical side.there was some good stuff recorded in paris, copenhagen and batsford. i've been listening to alot of the copenhagen tracks and out-takes and the overall sound is great. pretty dark but then that session was hardly a chuckle-trousered affair.
monday, june 26th 2000
athens, greece

arrived this morning to play the first of two gigs in the lycabetus theatre, which is apparently near the parthenon. no site of any greek antiquities as of yet, even from the top floor of the hotel.........this city seems huge and apparently we're situated in what a local described as a kind of no-man's land......lots of traffic outside the window......and parked cars everywhere which is explained by the fact that they operate a system here whereby car licences are issued for different days of the week in order to alleviate the serious traffic congestion ie you have a car and you're only allowed to drive that car on mondays, wednesdays, fridays and sundays...........what happens of course is that if you've got the dosh you then buy another car that you can drive on tuesdays, thursdays and saturdays...................mmmm.............we had an amazing time in florence..........played open-air, right in the heart of the old town at the piazza san croce..........it doesn't get better than this....went on and played in thessaloniki last night at the earth theatre..... a beautiful modern amphitheatre which had actually been dug out of the hill that overlooks that city.....a brilliant audience who exhibited great patience at hearing a set with nine new songs and a band which ignored repeated requets for creep(....understandable on their part, the requests that is, as this was our first visit) and pop is dead (..... cheeky bastards....)

getting a little worried about how easy it is to drink vast amounts of alcohol on tour...kick-started by the lovely laika people who apart from playing some great shows with us also happen to make the greatest margaritas outside of mexico itself......they are dangerous touring partners..

the new songs are working pretty well now in the set....'in limbo's still a little tricky but it's more than made up by the way 'the national anthem' and 'everything in its right place' is going ..........our crew by the way are doing an immense job working outside in incredible heats while we swan around like popstars..........
A few lines related to this song can be found in the hidden Kid A booklet [click to enlarge]:
The files for the Kid A Mnesia Exhibition contain numerous stems for the song. In one stem for the ending vocal effects, an early version of the track is barely audible. This version has slightly different lyrics from the final track, including "I'm lost in limbo" in the first verse.
This recording comes from the july 4th 2000 show in Berlin:
Steve Lamacq: "There's 'In Limbo', which... this was another early song wasn't it, because this was called 'Lost At Sea' at one point, but it's called 'In Limbo', which I notice as well, was a phrase which cropped up in your... in Ed, your..."
Ed: "Ah yes, the diary."
Steve: "...diary, isn't there actually something in there which says... talking about the recording process 'there was very little played, but a lot of talk, the problem is that we are essentially in limbo'."
Ed: "Right. Ba boom, here's a song, cool."
Thom: "Yeah, I think, well... from my point of view, it was much more about... my partner, she is doing a phd in Dante's Inferno, you know Dante's Inferno... and we have this tape in our car, which is basically Dante's Inferno, which is a good, cheery drive. (laughs)"
Steve: "I was going to say, it's not Bruce Springsteen, is it?"
Thom: "No, it aint, erm, but I just got really into all the aspects of limbo, the levels of hell, and because that's... it's quite formative to the way that we all think about heaven and hell and so on, and this song was kicking around at the time and it sounded... once we'd started recording, it sounded to me... like some of the voice stuff on it, really just sounds like the voices from limbo, voices that can't get out. (clears throat and coughs deliberately)"
Steve: "Ok."
Thom: "Okay..." Ed: (laughs)
Thom: "I had this thing for a while where I was falling through trapdoors all the time, into like, acid flashbacks. I'd be talking to someone and then I'd be falling through the earth, and it went on for months and months, and it was really weird. And that was all happening towards the end of OK Computer. And that was all linked in with death. Seeing people dead, like, as I'm talking to you... It's okay," he says reassuringly, looking at my shocked face. "I'm better now."
Q: "How was the loop at the end of 'In Limbo' recorded? It sort of sounds like seashore crashes."

Ed: "That's a bit of a software trick. It was just the sounds of the band - guitar, bass, drums - manipulated and distorted through a plug-in."

Q: "Which plug-in?"

Ed: "It's one of those funny things - we don't want to give the game away too clearly. Portishead got really annoyed when it was leaked about the samples they were using before their album came out, because they were worried about other people using those samples. Part of the thing about working with computers is you spend a lot of time seeing what works. And once you fall upon something you really like and feel is yours, you're quite loathe to give out all the information, because, well, you still have some use to be made of it, and you don't want someone nicking your idea. We want to surprise people and get the most out of the instruments, boxes, and stuff we're using. And the only way you do that is by not revealing anything."
Q: "Were you in effect suffering from a form of writer's block?"

Thom: "It wasn't really a writer's block because words were coming out like diarrhoea but they were all awful! And I couldn't tell the difference - which was much worse. But that was because, personally speaking, I'd lost all confidence."

Q: "When and how did it come back?"

Thom: "It came back when we recorded 'The National Anthem'. I really, really love that track. 'Everything In Its Right Place' I really, really love as well. And 'In Limbo' I'm still proud of just for the disorientating, floaty feel we managed to capture. It comes from this really peculiar place."
Colin: "I think, it's like, um, he's great for us because he's good at getting a group of sounds together and presenting them in a good way and it's good to work with someone who's like your own age as well, you know. It's, um, what does Nigel bring to it? And he's quite good with momentum, as well, tries to keep things moving fast. And he's a really good friend of mine as well, and we hang out. Like, he came on tour with us in Europe..." [laughter]

Q: [laugther] "Yeah."

Colin: "...and played tambourine on one song every night and he had the piss taken out of him by our crew, making sure his fingers weren't too sore. It meant we could play the song because we really needed the tambourine on it, it's a song called 'In Limbo'. But he's just great and he's a lovely man and, you know, he's a friend so you just want the best for your friends. And he has an overall sense of fair play which he brings to Radiohead as well which is a really important quality when you're dealing with a group of five people who have their own power-based relationships and political relationships built up over working together for 15 years."
Thom: "It's a nightmare to play live. The cross rhythm is very hard to get right. And the fact that the guitars on the record are impossible to reproduce live. You can only hear two, but Jonny did loads of them, the mix is very subtle. Jonny hasn't built a machine yet [to reproduce it]."
This performance comes from the Rock am Ring festival on june 1st 2001:
  Amnesiac tour may 2001 june 2001 07/'01 august 2001 september 2001 10/2001
Optimistic [10] 01 05 07 08 17 20 09 14 29 04
In Limbo [12] 26 28 30 01 02 04 24 27 29 30 02 03
Morning Bell [34] 26 28 30 01 02 04 09 18 20 23 24 27 29 30 07 30 01 03 05 07 08 14 16 17 20 08 09 11 14 29 30 02 03 04
Motion Picture Soundtrack [4] 23 27 29 07
  2002 Iberian tour july 2002 august 2002
In Limbo [4] 26 27 31 06
Morning Bell [11] 22 23 24 26 27 30 31 01 03 05 06
  Hail to the Thief tour (1st half) may 2003 june 2003 july 2003 august 2003
Kid A [22] 18 19 22 24 25 05 07 13 26 04 08 11 12 14 03 13 15 18 21 23 26 30
In Limbo [1] 07
Morning Bell [17] 18 22 24 05 13 20 22 26 04 05 09 12 16 03 13 21 28
  Hail to the Thief tour (2nd half) sept. 2003 october 2003 november 2003 dec. 2003 april/may 2004
Kid A [17] 23 26 28 02 09 15 10 11 23 24 26 29 30 04 15 18 23
In Limbo [3] 06 10 13
Morning Bell [14] 23 26 01 04 06 09 10 15 23 29 04 15 18 23
  In Rainbows tour (2nd half) august 2008 october 2008 march 2009 august 2009
Kid A [7] 09 13 07 08 16 24 21
Optimistic [18] 01 06 08 13 15 19 20 25 27 28 01 02 05 08 15 22 26 25
In Limbo [2] 20 08
Morning Bell [13] 03 04 06 08 12 15 19 24 28 02 27 23 29