From Spotify and The Ringer, this is Dissect, long form musical analysis broken into short digestible episodes. This is episode 3 of our season long dissection of Radioheads and Rainbows. I'm your host Cole Kushner. On our last episode we dissected in Rainbows opening track 15 Step, an energetic blast of intricate, relentless rhythms over which Tom explores themes of disconnection and death.
The energy and themes of 15 Step spill over into In Rainbows' next track, the subject of our episode today, Bodysnatchers. Of all the songs on In Rainbows, the backstory of recording Bodysnatchers might be the most fascinating.
As we detailed last episode, when Radiohead failed to successfully record the album after trying their touring track, they reunited with longtime producer Nigel Godridge, who suggested that the band take a recording excursion, another trick they used in the past when struggling in the studio.
In October of 2006, Nigel and the band packed up their gear and for three weeks stayed in a 100-plus room, dilapidated mansion, and Wiltshire named Totentom House, which was built in the 1720s and was being prepared for demolition. As Johnny Green would recall, it had been a prep school up until the early 80s, and then it was a rehab place for recovering heroin addicts. It was just a plumbing free place full of buckets of rat poison. It was a bit grim, unquote.
Tom also added, quote, it was kind of the wrong time of year, it was cold and damp, there wasn't even a functioning toilet, it was quite alarming. If the wind picked up, you couldn't really stand beneath the windows because the top windows kept blowing out, they were all broken, unquote. What the mansion did offer was atmosphere, adventure, and freedom. Tom said, quote, we could do what we wanted, and it was great.
You just get into this crazy headspace really fast, and a couple of days you lose track of time and where you are, as you're just in music 24 hours a day, unquote. Throughout their three weeks stay, the band recorded in a bizarre circular room dub the round chamber. Two live recordings in the round chamber made the final album, one of which is Body Snatchers.
Guitarist Edo Brian recalled quote, Body Snatchers will always remind us of Tottenham House, the track reflects the weird energy in the house. Body Snatchers begins with Tom York playing the song Central Guitar Part. Interestingly, the intense, muffled distortion we hear on his guitar is not produced by an amplifier or an effect pedal, which are the two most common ways guitar distortion is created. Rather, Tom's guitars plug directly into Nigel's vintage Electrodine 1204 mixing console.
Made in the 1960s, these Electrodine consoles help define much of the sound we associate with that era, from the Beach Boys to Motown. Tom said quote, Nigel has this really wicked old mixing desk that he managed to get off a studio in LA. It's from the late 60s. It's the exact model they used to record Motown stuff. Of course, if you turn up everything on the console to the max, it sounds like what you hear on Body Snatchers. Unquote.
This unique blown out tone has heard clearly in the song Solo Guitar Introduction before the band joins in. On the surface, this is a pretty standard way to begin the song. Introduce the main musical part on its own, and then the remaining instruments and vocals follow. But this is radiohead after all, so we're inclined to suspect that this intro isn't as simple as it appears. And it turns out this is true. Because what's happening here is something known as a metric fake out.
As its name implies, metric fake outs mislead us about the song's meter or rhythm. They get us feeling the beat incorrectly, only to reveal the correct way once more elements enter the song. This will make more sense when you hear it, so let's take a look at a few examples of metric fake outs before returning to the intro of Body Snatchers. We'll start with the opening moments of the 3-11 song appropriately titled Offbeat Bear Ass.
Okay, so here we have a guitar and bass introducing their parts before the rest of the band comes in. Not totally unlike Body Snatchers. Instinctively, we feel these guitars are playing on the downbeats. We feel them like this. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. Now, when the drums come in after this introduction, we'll realize that the guitars are actually playing the offbeat, totally changing our initial feeling of the part. Could you feel that switch when the drums came in?
That's the fake out. You felt the beat or meter one way, only to realize you've been fooled when more musical information is added. So in reality, we should be counting those intro chords like this. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, three, one. The same thing happens in Sabrina Carpenter's Thumbs. See if you can recognize the metric fake out in the song's intro. The The The Did you feel that shift when the drums came in?
We felt the string part on the downbeats, only to realize they're actually the upbeats when the drums entered. The science behind the metric fake out phenomenon has been compared to the psychological concept known as Garden Pathing, which in a nutshell argues that if you receive enough stimulus details that typically result in a common outcome, your brain immediately assumes that outcome and stops scanning the details.
We can observe a similar phenomenon to the metric fake out in what psycho linguistics is called Garden Path Sentences. Sentences that are temporarily misleading because of their structure. Take for example this sentence, fat people eat accumulates. Chances are your brain first heard fat people as the subject, eat as the verb, and then got confused when the sentence ended with accumulates. But the sentence is actually fat people eat accumulates.
It's pointing out that fat accumulates when people eat it. This is the same principle as the metric fake out. Our brain assumes one thing based on the initial information it's given, and is temporarily confused when new information forces us to reinterpret our initial understanding. Now that you have a decent grip on the metric fake out, let's see what exactly Radiohead is up to on the intro for body snatchers.
Okay so instinctively we feel the guitar part begins on the downbeat, and thus we feel the meter like this. 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 Of course as you're rightly suspecting this isn't actually the proper count. What we're feeling is the downbeats right now or actually the offbeats. Just listen to how this count suddenly feels wrong once the drums enter. Pretty strange right? It's definitely one of the more convincing metric fake outs I've heard.
Unlike the simple guitar and string parts we heard by 311 and Sabrina Carpenter, body snatchers guitar part on its own is unorthodox and busy, so our brain already has enough work to do just following it, let alone attempting to feel it in the unintuitive but quote unquote correct rhythm. Personally I know I'm being faked out every time I listen to the body snatchers intro. Yet I still have trouble feeling the guitar on the
offbeats before the drums come in. The garden path phenomenon is just too strong. Along with the driving drums and bass, Tom enters a song singing a melody that mirrors his guitar part. He doles out his lyric stringently in three syllable fragments. I do not understand
what it is, I've done wrong. As he often does, Tom is playing with vague generalizations, but we gain more understanding of the song's themes when we consider their inspiration, which Tom stated was a composite of Victorian ghost stories, the novel and film The Stepford Wives, and his own feeling of quote, your physical consciousness trapped without being able to connect fully with anything else. Tom also said quote, the lyrics of body snatchers came from
cutting and pasting minds from The Stepford Wives. I got obsessed with it. I wrote lots and lots of excerpts from the book next to each other and started cutting. The idea that you can be captured by something external, a ghost, comes from The Stepford Wives. At the end of the movie,
you see a new conscious entering someone's body, unquote. For those unfamiliar with Ira Leven's The Stepford Wives, it was written during the height of the 1970s women's liberation movement and tells the story of Joanna Eberhart, a talented photographer who moves with her husband and children to the picture perfect suburb, Stepford. She begins to notice how all the women are subservient
to their husbands, have perfect bodies, and are dedicated only to home making. She begins to suspect the Stepford Wives are being brainwashed and fear she could become the next victim. While it's technically left ambiguous, it's ultimately implied that the women are actually robot
lookalikes created by the Stepford men after murdering their wives. Now, as he implied in the quotes we heard, Tom seemed less inspired by the specific plot of the Stepford Wives, and more about the idea of a body being possessed by another entity, be it a spirit or a ghost. I recently read and watched the Stepford Wives and attempt to find some of the lyrical fragments
in body snatchers, and for the most part I came up empty handed. Either I missed them, or the chosen words and phrases were fragmented and spliced together to the point of being unrecognizable. In any case, within the context of the song's inspiration, we can revisit those opening lyrics, keeping in mind Tom's fascination with being possessed, and how this idea related to his own feelings of alienation and the inability to connect with anything. He sings, I do not understand
what it is I've done wrong. Once again, Tom opens the song singing about the mistakes he's made, reflecting the opening and closing of the previous song 15 Step. How come I end up where I started? How come I end up where I went wrong? Ironically, this cycle continues here on body snatchers, as Tom dwells on his mistakes again, seeming no closer to figuring out exactly where he went wrong.
Then as the verse continues, he begins to suspect this wrong feeling might be symptomatic of a larger issue, similar to how Joanna Everhart began suspecting something was wrong with the Stepford wives. The full of love, the check for love, the kind of love you give to the world. Tom continues the three syllable phrases singing, full of holes, check for pulse, blink your eye, one for yes, two for no. Here the consciousness of someone is called into question, and the
medical eye-blink test implies paralysis. Communication via eye movement is common for those with locked incindrum, who as a result of brainstem damage live with total paralysis but are still conscious with normal cognitive function. Given the song's background, perhaps this test is being administered after the new consciousness enters the body. But let's also recall the troubled relationship thread we heard on 15-step, where Tom expressed a lack of communication between him and his lover.
You used to be alright, what happened? Did the cat get your tongue? Perhaps we're witnessing a similar scenario play out here on body snatchers. Tom did something wrong, and now paralysis is being used to convey his partner's silence. It could also be that Tom feels he no longer knows his person, so much so that he's questioning if they've been possessed by some other entity. In any case, it's clear Tom is again having trouble connecting with things around him,
be it a romantic partner or the world at large. Body snatchers then continues with its chorus, and there's a few things I want to point out before we listen. To this point in the song, Tom has been playing the main guitar riff while Johnny and Ed have been using their guitars like percussion instruments. And the chorus, however, both Johnny and Ed will join Tom,
each accenting the main guitar riff in their own way. It creates a really cool stereo effect, with Ed's guitar pan to the left channel, Johnny's pan to the right, and Tom's straight up the middle. Tom matches this new instrumental intensity with his vocal part, where he soars into a high register and borders on screaming. And this is where the backstory of the song becomes increasingly relevant, as during his stay at the Tottenham House, Tom got extremely sick. Quote,
I couldn't swallow and it was all very horrible. I stayed in the caravan for two days thinking I was going to get better, and then it just got worse and worse and worse. I'm quote. Tom also noted that quote, I have this thing just before I get really sick, I'll have this 12 hour hyperactive mania, and body snatchers was recorded during one of those. I felt genuinely out of it when I did that. The vocal is one take, and we didn't do anything to it afterwards.
My best vocals are always the ones that happened then and there. Just after recording it, I collapsed. Tom breaks away from his three syllable phrasing, discreasing the chorus's two line hook. I have no idea what I'm talking about. I'm trapped in this body and can't get out. Here Tom speaks from the perspective of the possessed, unfamiliar with what's coming out of his
own mouth, feeling foreign in his own body. Knowing the backstory of the song's recording, it feels incredibly fitting that Tom recorded these lines while sick, when he was trapped in his own virus-infected body and forced to live out the symptoms. The lyrics of the chorus will take on additional layers when to hear more of the song, so for now we'll move on to the brief bridge section that follows the chorus. It's here that will be introduced to a new instrument, the Ohn's
Marteno. What the fuck is an Ohn's Marteno? I'll tell you right after the break. Welcome back to Dysect. Before the break we heard body snatchers chorus, which is followed by a brief bridge where Johnny Greenwood's Ohn's Marteno makes an appearance. Before we talk about what this is, let's hear it in action. So that high-pitched, wavering kind of eerie sound we just heard is produced by the Ohn's
Marteno, an early analog synth that looks like a small keyboard. While you can use the keys to play it, most players take advantage of the instrument's unique ring control feature, where a player puts their index finger into a small metal ring that's connected to a wire that extends the length of the keyboard. Slighting the ring right or left along this wire controls the pitch, using the keyboard as
a visual reference to hit your desired notes. If you wiggle your finger while playing, you can even create vibrato, similar to a singer. The Ohn's Marteno was invented in 1928 by French cellist Marie-Smarteno. Johnny Greenwood discovered the instrument through his love of the French experimental composer Olivier Messian, whose 1948 composition The Turingalila Symphony features the instrument extensively. Johnny began playing the Ohn's Marteno during the Kid A Amnesiac era,
and since then, the instrument has become a recurring sound in the band's repertoire. Here it is featured prominently on Kid A's The National Anthem. On body snatchers, we actually hear two Ohn's Marteno parts playing simultaneously, one pan hard right and the other hard left. While we now take these kinds of unique additions and radiohead songs for granted, we shouldn't overlook just how bizarre the presence of this obscure instrument is and an otherwise
straight up rock and roll song. It's these kinds of implausible, tamberal decisions that are so uniquely radiohead, and for me, the retro futuristic sound of The Ohn's Marteno is extremely additive to the song's semi-paranormal theme of feeling alien in your own skin, feeling like your body has been taken over by something supernatural. On the song's second verse, Tom briefly returns to a more subdued vocal delivery, singing,
you killed the sound, removed backbone. Tom then ramps up his delivery to say, a pale imitation before belting out the final phrase with the edges sawing off. On one hand, this continues the motif of a body being possessed by something. This spineless pale imitation is not what it appears to be, there's something off, something not human about it. But the phrasing here seems deliberate, and we suspect Tom might be using the alien analogy to attack the commercial music industry.
Indeed, of all the lyrics on In Rainbows, this verse and the upcoming modified chorus have the strongest interpretive case for addressing radiohead separation with their former label EMI. They'd been pondering the decisions since fulfilling their initial EMI contract with 2003's Held of the Thief. Tom told Time Magazine then, quote, I like some of the people out of a record
company, but the time is at hand when you have to ask why anyone needs one. And yes, it would probably give us some perverse pleasure to say, fuck you to this decaying business model, unquote. In 2007, EMI was purchased by TerraFerma, a private equity firm headed by founder Guy Hands. This purchase appeared to make the band's decision against resigning with EMI easier, as Edo Bryan told the observer, quote,
EMI is in a state of flux. It's been taken over by someone who's never owned a record company before, Guy Hands and TerraFerma. And they don't realize what they're dealing with. It was really sad to leave all the people we've worked with, but he wouldn't give us what we wanted. He didn't know what to offer us. TerraFerma doesn't understand the music industry, unquote.
With Radiohead being one of the biggest acts in EMI's portfolio, CEO Guy Hands didn't take the band's decision well, and an EMI spokesperson claimed the band had demanded a $10 million advance in order to resign. Radiohead refuted this claim adamantly, with Tom telling the Guardian, quote, it fucking piss me off, who could have taken them to court. The idea that we were after so much money was stretching the truth to a breaking point. That was Guy Hands PR company briefing against
us, and I'll tell you what, it fucking ruined my Christmas, unquote. With this context in mind, we can interpret the lyrics of Body Snatcher's second verse as expressing Tom's anger and frustration with the EMI situation, which is itself emblematic of the perpetual conflict between artist and executive, art and commerce. In this reading, you killed the sound as a direct attack
on the profit-minded executive degrading authentic music. Remove backbone relates to being spineless, which is commonly used to mean lacking character or dignity, perhaps a description of the executive or bland commercial music. Thus we get a pale imitation, lifeless, second-rate music made solely
for the purpose of profit. With the edges sought off is an unusual phrase, but seems to imply something that lacks detail or definition, which again feels in line with the kind of dull music being described. But this phrase, with the edges sought off, might also relate to the opening mind you killed the sound. Specifically, Tom could be talking about an actual audio file, referring to the way his pop music is often over-compressed in order to make the entire track as loud as possible,
amplifying them beyond the maximum allowed limit. This causes what's called clipping, and results in muddied or distorted sound quality. And if you look at an actual waveform of these over-compressed audio files, you'll see that the edges of the waveform are actually sought off. This technique is commonly criticized for killing the sound because it destroys dynamic range. It's just an onslaught of volume, the musical equivalent of fast food stuff with sodium.
Tom's apparent critique of the music industry, and perhaps specifically CEO Guy Hanz, continues with the song's modified hook. Tom alters the opening line of the hook, now singing, I have no idea what you are talking about. Recall they be first saying I have no idea what I am talking about. He continues the critique singing, your mouth moves only when someone's hands up your
ass. Following the second verse, it's within reason to speculate these lines might be aimed at Guy Hanz, especially since Tom even uses Guy's last name as part of the line, someone's hand up your ass. The line also maintains the robot or possess motif, adding to it the idea of a puppet and its master, an analogy in line with the common critique of a CEO being the mouth puppet of its shareholders. But of all the lines and body snatchers, I have no idea what you're talking about,
is the closest to a direct quote of the steppford wives at least that I could find. When protagonist Joanna Eberhardt confronts her husband with her theory that he's planning to kill and replace her with a robot servant, the husband replies quote, I don't know what you're talking about. Moments later he repeats quote, I haven't the foggy idea what you're talking about.
Now as body snatchers continues, it transitions into an entirely new section, where we hear for the first time an acoustic guitar enter the song, playing in new chord progression. We'll also notice when this acoustic guitar is introduced, the main fuzzy electric guitar will drop out altogether. The contrast between the clean acoustic guitar and the fuzzy electric guitar makes a pretty striking transition. Take a listen.
During this section, we also hear Ed and Johnny's dual guitar tracks continue in the left and right channels, with Ed now taking the lead. He plays a high single string melody using a device called the Ebo. This small battery operated device is held in a guitar's hand and placed directly above the guitar's pickups, where it creates an electromagnetic pulse that vibrates the string directly
under it. So unlike a guitar pick, which produces a strong defined attack when the string is plucked, the Ebo produces dynamic swells more like a bowed string instrument like a violin, hence the name Ebo. Ed uses the Ebo for his lead guitar part throughout this section of body snatchers, creating an
ethereal effect similar to Johnny's on the Martino. Over this new section, Tom sings a more traditional vocal melody, asking, has the light gone out for you because the light's gone out for me, it's the 21st century. Tom seems to return to the perspective of the body being possessed, confiding in someone else
about his condition and asking if they feel the same. The repetition of it's the 21st century seems to imply this condition is universal, symptomatic of the times, but also that the people might be waking up to what's going on. And it's here we should probably address the song titled Body Snatchers, which is almost certainly a nod to the classic sci-fi film Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The film is about a small American town that is quietly invaded by aliens who grow in seed pods
and take over people's bodies while they sleep. These alien intruders look and sound just like
their victims, but are devoid of any human emotion or feeling. Similar to how the Stepford Wives was viewed as an allegory for conservative men's resistance to the 1970s feminist movement, Invasion of the Body Snatchers made at the height of the Cold War, has been theorized as an allegory for many things, from the fear of McCarthyism to the alienation felt in mass society, to the tyrannical egalitarianism and loss of personal autonomy in communist societies.
Now as we continue to analyze the remaining lyrics of Body Snatchers, we'll find evidence that suggests Tom is using the core concept of the film to critique contemporary 21st century society. It's familiar territory for Tom and the band, as their discography is chock-full of songs that offer a cynical view of consumer-driven capitalism of the modern West.
These critiques were especially potent on OK computer, where songs like No Surprises take on the perspective of a suicidal 9-5 office drone crumbling under the monotony of his pacified predictable life. The job that slowly kills him, bruises that won't be laid.
Now taking another look at Body Snatchers' bridge, the lines, the light's gone out for me, has the light gone out for you, offer a similar interpretation of Snow Surprises, with Tom embodying someone who's waking up to the life they've fallen into, someone suspecting that things are not quite right, not what they appear to be. He continues singing, he can follow you like a dog, it brought me to my knees. Like the alien presence of Body Snatchers or the threat of robotic replacement in the
steppered wives, this mysterious it looms over Tom's character. It's unavoidable, incessant, and escapable, leading to eventual surrender. We might wonder if this analogizes cultural influence, the idea that the systems of Western society are so powerful, so unavoidably
ingrained into seemingly every facet of daily life. We inevitably find ourselves living a lifestyle that may be at odds with our morals, be it supporting exploitative labor, contributing to global warming, or accelerating globalism by purchasing products from massive corporations like Amazon, Apple, or Google. Even our attention now is being commodified and sold by corporations like Meda, where the product is us by way of our data. Thus we get the following line, they got a skin and
they put me in, they got a skin and they put me in. Again the robot alien motif here is obvious, but following the previous train of thought, the idea of being wrapped in a skin by an ominous day offers a pretty potent question. Are we simply avatars in a for-profit game controlled by handful of wealthy executives and politicians? Are our lives being harvested for profit? Are we little more than robot servants to corporate masters, all of the steppered wives,
or natural resource extractors, all of the pond people in the body snatchers? It's a cynical view, but not one without truth, as we watch the global wealth disparity between the rich and poor reach record highs. These are the systems into which we are born, and it's quite easy to fall into a life that you one day realize has mostly served the guy hands of the world. The bridge continues with Tom singing on the lines wrapped around my face for anyone else to see,
and for anyone else to see. It seems a continuation of the previous line about the foreign skin they put him in, conjuring images of human skin being stretched over a robot or alien face. He then sings, I'm a lie, with the eye sound elongated and fading into the musical ether, as if being swallowed up or overtaken. Cleverly or coincidentally, the phrase I'm a lie sounds a lot like I'm a live, and the duality of this a lie a live homophone couldn't be more thematically perfect,
simultaneously capturing the fraudulent existence Tom is portraying. Now this line signals a shift in the music, as the tear Johnny begins a really cool sequence of string bends on his guitar, adding to the feeling that things are starting to unravel, just like our narrator. Then in what's probably my favorite moment of the song, all three electric guitars unite to emphasize a G chord. Now normally this wouldn't be such a big deal, but up to this point the three
guitars have been fulfilling separate roles. Tom's fuzzy guitar played the central rhythm part while Ed provided ambiance and Johnny played lead, but for this moment all three guitars hammer home variations of the same chord, strumming in unison, creating an incredibly thick, dense, distorted wall of sound that brings the song to a potent climax. Now if this were most other bands, body snatchers extended bridge section would be followed by
return to the song's chorus. This would follow the standard song structure of verse chorus, verse chorus, bridge chorus. Body snatchers chorus will never actually be heard again, instead we get something like a coda, a section that includes new musical material that will bring the piece to its close. It begins with a breakdown where this new riff is introduced. This riff builds momentum until the song once again explodes into another climactic section,
where Johnny's lead guitar really shines. He accents the same rhythm as this new riff, but jumps around playing aggressive two note stabs in the high register, helping to bring body snatchers to a blistering conclusion. Where Tom screams, I've seen it coming, they've seen it coming over and over in chaotic pandemonium as if alien spaceships were descending from the sky. Conclusions Between 15 Step and Body Snatchers, innraimboes gets off to an accelerated,
high octane start. Understanding body snatchers' supernatural inspiration, it seems fitting the song about being possessed by a supernatural entity was recorded while Tom's body was possessed by a virus and a dilapidated mansion on the verge of collapse. It's a cinematic backstory by fitting of the song's cinematic inspiration, but like so many of Tom's lyrics, their ambiguity and the things left unsaid offers us listeners an opportunity to fill in the blanks.
Indeed, in regards to innraimboes, Tom said quote, of all the lyrics I've ever written, I hope the ones on this record will deliver the widest range of interpretations. In my opinion, it's a mature perspective on art, because the experience of art is not just the art itself, it's also where the art inspires your mind to wander, where ideas
materialize, connections are made, or emotions are articulated. This is why art remains an active experience regardless of when it was created, and the art that survives decades or even
centuries is largely a result of its truths remaining relevant across time. Such is the case with so many radiohead songs, including Body Snatchers, where Tom's feeling of panic disconnection expressed through a metaphor of being possessed by a foreign entity feels increasingly accurate in the rapidly advancing information age, where our identities are fragmenting across platforms, where we are to cultivate and maintain both digital and physical identities, a body and an
avatar, a personality and a personal brand. Such fracturing identity presents one of the biggest challenges of the 21st century. How to remain authentically human in a world in which human behavior is being harvested, in which human intelligence is integrating with artificial intelligence, in which the digital and the physical are slowly becoming indistinguishable. The form of progress or a form of living, which is more beneficial to the way human beings want to be, rather than
being reduced to these two-dimensional avatars that appear on your phone. Like the moment we adopt a dot-mode of behavior that mirror our avatars, but we are at the same time. Now finally, formulating ways to think beyond that and going, well hang on a minute, I don't want to be that. I don't want to be that. It's a parallel expression of Tom's lyrics, I'm trapped in this body
and can't get out. They got a skin and they put me in and even I'm a lie. Body Snatchers to me, like the stories that inspired it, is about awakening from a system or experience we didn't volunteer ourselves for. It's about contending against outside forces, threatening our internal will so that we don't one day wake up feeling like we don't know who we are, feeling like we've been possessed.
Today's episode was written and produced by me, Cole Kushner. If you enjoyed the episode, please tell a friend about the new season or share it on social media, tagging at Dicek podcast. Additional musical and miracle analysis by Brad Osborne, audio editing by Kevin Pula, song recreations by Andrew Atwood, theme music by P. Row Credit. All right, thanks everyone, talk to you next time.