Like Spinning Plates (Radiohead song)

"Like Spinning Plates"
Song

"Like Spinning Plates" is a song written by the English alternative rock band Radiohead that appears on their 2001 album Amnesiac. It also appears on their live album, I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings.

Song Structure

The song is built over the reversed backing track of an electronic version of the then unreleased "I Will" (which would later be released in a much different form on Hail To The Thief). According to Thom Yorke, in an interview with The Wire, "We'd turned the tape [of "I Will"] around, and I was in another room, heard the vocal melody coming backwards, and thought, 'That's miles better than the right way round', then spent the rest of the night trying to learn the melody."

To achieve the song's distorted vocals, Yorke learned to sing the vocals backwards. Then, after hearing them back, he sang the backwards vocals backwards again, giving them an uneasy sound. This technique is similar to ones used by The Beatles and The Stone Roses on some of their songs.

Colin Greenwood said of the vocals, "In Copenhagen, I was listening to Woman's Hour. They were talking about this English composer, whose name I can't remember, who wrote a piece of music for a singer where all the phrasings were backward but she sung it forward. Thom sung the backwards melody. It was recorded forward then listened to backwards and he did the phrasing so as to create backward sounding words but it's sung forwards. It's kind of my favourite track."

On Amnesiac, the song segues into the final track on the album, "Life in a Glasshouse", through the electronic noises at the start of the latter.

Live

Due to the difficulty of performing this (along with many other songs from that era), the band had to rethink how to perform Like Spinning Plates, without any in-studio wizardry. On live performances, Thom Yorke usually plays on upright piano, and is sometimes joined by synths from Jonny Greenwood or other members, bass from Colin Greenwood and without any vocal editing. Despite the differences between studio and live, live version usually maintain the melody from the album version (in fact, the melody on the I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings version is the album version's reversed).

The song was first performed live on August 8th, at the Blossom Music Center in Cleveland (Indeed, this is the version found on I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings).

Music Video

A video was commissioned for this song, along with Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors, as a promo. It was directed by Johnny Hardstaff and Black Dog Films. It features 3D computer graphics of complex machinery and diagrams, and culminates with two Siamese twins' chests being ripped apart.

Notes

The lyrics, "I'm living in cloud-cuckoo-land" reference the saying Cloud cuckoo land, originally taken from the Greek play The Birds, written by Aristophanes.

Hidden Booklet

The hidden booklet found underneath the CD tray of Kid A has a page that references the above lyrics, "Cloud cuckoo land".