I came off at the end of that show, » he remembers, “sat in the dressing room and couldn’t speak. I actually couldn’t speak. People were saying, ’You all right ?’ I knew people were speaking to me. But I couldn’t hear them. And I couldn’t talk. I’d just so had enough. And I was bored with saying I’d had enough. I was beyond that.

That tour was a year too long. I was the first person to tire of it, then six months later everyone in the band was saying it. Then six months after that, nobody was talking any more. I remember coming off stage after the Birmingham NEC show. I could hear people talking, but I could not speak – and if anybody tried to touch me I think I would have strangled them. That was quite a scary thing. It was like, ’Please can we get the fuck out of here ?’

Q : « ’Pyramid Song’ and ’Everything In Its Right Place’ seem close ? »

Thom : « They were both written in the same week – the week I bought a piano (laughs). The chords I’m playing involve lots of black notes. You think you’re being really clever playing them but they’re really simple. For ’Everything’ I programmed my piano playing into a lap-top, but ’Pyramid’ sounded better untreated.

“Everything In Its Right Place.” I bought a piano for my house, a proper nice one — a baby grand. And that was the first thing I wrote on it. And I’m such a s*** piano player. I remember this Tom Waits quote from years ago, that what keeps him going as a songwriter is his complete ignorance of the instruments he’s using. So everything’s a novelty. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to get into computers and synths, because I didn’t understand how the f*** they worked.

 Beaucoup de gens disent que cette chanson n’a pas de sens. C’est faux. Elle ne parle que de ça. (la paralysie muette et vengeresse qu’il a ressentie jusqu’à l’enregistrement de Kid A et d’Amnesiac.) En Angleterre, explique-t-il, sucer un citron se rapporte à la grimace qu’on fait parce qu’il est âpre. Il tord ses traits dans une grimace féroce. C’est la tête que j’ai eue pendant trois ans.

And ’Everything In Its Right Place’ was one of the very first songs that we actually realized it’s great, even if 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 : “[Nigel] didn’t think much of ’Everything In Its Right Place’ when he heard it, and he didn’t think it was gonna 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 keyboard. And Nigel like used to do pro tools and scratch the sound waves and made all these mad sounds that no one had done before. And it was amazing.

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. And came out, you know… I remember coming that night or later that night, hearing – or the next morning – thinking ‘This is just amazing, this is wonderful, this is like…’ you know, the potential of using this new technology, you know, not resorting to guitars, and the whole thing of it. And it was, it was…”

Chris: “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: “It was a series of small ones really. The first one I remember was the one when we were in Batsford and erm, 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… it’s… different’, and it’s something that really excites us. So that was one, but when you’re in the studio for eighteen months, it’s… you have little breakthroughs, sort of… they often come together as well. You often have a really, really creative week, then you’re fallow for like four or five weeks, and that can be very frustrating. Erm… it was just a series of… (to Colin) it just went on and on, didn’t it?”

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.

tuesday, july 27th 1999

a pretty frustrating day, but now we’ve been doing this for so long, you realise it can’t all be like last week. it starts well with a different version of ’how to dissapear’ and ’everything in its right place’. we then get sidetracked by a couple of loose ideas for songs (one is very like the Fall). However we have definitely lost our way with ’ you and whose army’- it was sounding great last week, so what happened today ? time to go home.

tuesday, september 7th 1999

there seemed to be a lot of breaks today, which often means that we’re worrying about something. recording worries over whether the ’canned applause’ mobile setup will be ready. management swing by to answer fraught questions and generally alleviate anxieties. oh yes, music is what we’re about (easily forgotten sometimes) and ’everything in its right place’ sounds good.

wednesday, september 8th 1999

a good and long rehearsal. pick up where we left off on ’everything’ and move swiftly on to ’optimistic’ – it’s blinding – definitely the most formed of the songs to put to tape – it comes from the swamp. the music is interrupted by the new bulletin board on our all-new singing and dancing website. v. exciting. and of course most of the messages posted are concerned with the atrocities in east timor. what’s the betting that international forces fail to enter east timor before mass genocide is once again committed. if this sounds flippant – it’s not meant to – sorry. back to the music – return to ’up on the ladder’ -thom has a new arrangement – start stripping the song apart – already sounding better.

we’re the orchestra to your board and we beg for the scraps from your table all we want is to be like you music to play your ___ pump pumping sounds through the speakers below hello i’ve tried so hard to keep still they will chew you up they will spit out your bones standing in the shadows at the end of the bed i never said anything i live a wallpaper life of playing guitar in a band it seems so volatile oh my, oh my he was a good man and he said he was the best they said that even life spat in his face he put everything back in it’s right place a conflict of interest you might say are you trying to bribe me ?

for my sins we are plants, happy plants super human builders day see

i leave you for bitch of _____ and go green loved to death like eight mayo maids with a grin like roadkill fine..lets stay everything is alive there is nothing but blue skies from now on no ghosts no skeletons a man hovers in the dust…dust..dust. thankyou very much thankyou everybody drive home safe and carefully tonight and we’ll see you in our lounge in a few weeks time goodnight ! god bless ! lets go home Jonny.

But not as strange and beautiful as “Everything In Its Right Place”, which is just astonishing. Thom clambers behind the piano while the busy momentum gets people clapping along and Jonny busies himself with his remote-control box… only for shards of Thom’s voice to start leaping out from all angles. It seems Jonny’s sampling Thom singing things like “Yesterday, I woke up sucking a lemon” and then building a frenzied, layered groove out of it, that’s just this side of being out of control. And just to emphasize the madness of it all, Thom comes to sit on the edge of the stage, letting his voice ricochet around him, feeling and feeding off the chaos, until it all becomes too much and he leaps off the stage and runs up the red carpet in the middle of the stalls, slapping hands in a flash on his way out. Cue hysteria, everyone on their feet, and the kind of cheering last heard when the lions were presented with their Sunday lunch.

monday, june 26th 2000 athens, greece

(…)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……….

Paul: “Yeah, I take that. Whereas… the first two tracks on the album are, I think, quite brave openers. I mean, ‘Everything In Its Right Place’, very much what you would say is not an instantly recognizable…”

Ed: “Well, Chris Bryce and Brian, our managers, said well, Chris particularly said, ‘what do you want…’ – you know, we were talking about the track openers – he said ‘What is the first track that you would like people to hear?’ And unanimously, we all said ‘Everything In Its Right Place’. And it was… I mean, that was a track that was first… it was the first completed. It was recorded… finished last summer, and it was Thom and Nigel. (…)”

Phil: “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) You know, but it doesn’t…”

Paul: “From a listener point of view I’d have to say it’s a good call. Because it really starts… it really… it sounds like the beginning of something.”

Ed: “Yeah, it definitely sets the tone of it. I mean, it’s the key to this record, I think, that everyone who’s listened to it and gets it… it’s like, it’s like all… I think probably like OK Computer. It takes a few listens and you’ve got to find the space, you know, that is… I know it sounds a bit wanky, but there is a certain space for this record. You’ve got to be in a certain frame of mind. If you’re… Don’t play this record before you go out clubbing on a saturday night. You will not. When you come back, you can play the record. Absolutely. But there’s a certain space to it, and it hasn’t got, you know, it hasn’t… 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 appears… it doesn’t have the obvious, huge crescendos that have existed on previous tracks and records of ours.”