House of Cards

The making of the "House of Cards" video.

I don’t want to be your friend
I just want to be your lover
no matter how it ends
no matter how it starts
forget about your house of cards
and I’ll do mine
forget about your house of cards
and I’ll do mine
fall off the table and get swept under

denial denial

the infrastructure will collapse
from voltage spikes
put your keys in the bowl
kiss your husband goodnight
forget about your house of cards
and I’ll do mine
forget about your house of cards
and I’ll do mine
fall off the table and get swept under

denial
denial
denial
denial
(your ears should be burning)
denial denial
(your ears should be burning)

Uh, this is most definitely a love song.

--Thom Yorke (2008 August 4)

Thom [when asked if the lyrics from "House of Cards" were drawn from his personal life]: "I wish! Well, no, I don't wish. That key-party stuff was a big thing here in the seventies and eighties, and it always fascinated me."

--Rolling Stone, February 2008

John: Very impressive! Uh, “House of Cards” is the next track. A question that can relate to some—well, quite a lot of the songs: Are they more personal lyrically venture for you, Thom? I mean, are they personal things that you’re… Let’s say, well…

Thom: It was very much um, uh… psychic dumping… um, where I was deliberately trying to uh… as much as I possibly could, except for “Faust Arp”, to write quickly and not think about how… what sense could be made about it or not, so… Um, you know… in essence, one of the things I’ve been most wary of—talking about the record at all—is actually taking any responsibility for the lyrics, or having to comment on them, because um… it was…[sighs] I kind of don’t feel answerable to them in a way. Sometimes with these lyrics I’ve done sort of paste them together in a sort of much more constructive way, and you sort of feel there’s a point to explaining how you’ve done it. And I kind of… To me, of all the records we’ve done, this is the one I feel I can least explain anyway. [laughs]

John: Hmm. No, that’s interesting because I was listening to it the other day and thinking that there’s a kind of dream-like quality to the album as a whole, in a way. If you listen to the whole thing… say, if you’re driving along, it’s just kind of there, around you. And it’s almost as if the band are kind of lost in the music as you play together. And there are points when the singing seems as if it could be a shaman, or a shaman dancing as part of some kind of ritual, or something like that. Loosing, getting lost in the music, and…

Thom: Well, there are things… One of the reasons it took so long—and yes, I would love to be a shaman…

John: [laughs]

Thom: [laughs] One of the…

John: Maybe you are…

Thom: Maybe I am… I don’t think I do enough drugs for that. Um, one of the things that was really important—one of the reasons it took so long—was to get this… the pulse right on each tune—“House of Cards” being the most obvious example—where you kind of lose yourself in the pulse, and then the vocals can come in, sort of thing. Which is much like… you know, which is a much more… a dance music thing…much less a rock music thing. You can argue the Stones do it. And sometimes it happens. So I would agree to some extent that there’s this thing about being lost in stuff. I mean, “Reckoner” is absolutely that. You know, I think Nigel… that’s one of the things Nigel’s really, really good at… is finding the bits when we play, when we are lost in stuff. And it’s not necessarily the bits, but we’re enjoying it. It’s usually just before all that. [laughs]

John: [laughs]

Thom: ‘Cause by the time we’re enjoying it, we’re thinking ‘Ey, we’re good!’ And that exact point is where it gets crap.

John: Excellent.

--2008-01-03 | XFM Radio Interview

There’s also a lyric in "Jigsaw…" about exchanging phone numbers, while "House of Cards" has a line: 'I don’t want to be your friend, I just want to be your lover'. Is this Radiohead’s, um, sexy album?

“Oh yeah, most songs on the record are seduction songs. My version of it anyway. I guess it’s something that is not very often apparent, but it became apparent as time went on.”

--NME (8 December 2007)

While listening to the album, it gets more melancholic, and in that it is very different from Hail To The Thief, which was released four years earlier.

Thom : Yes, in some way. But we also had to start the album with something very energetic, because we had been away for so long ... We had to find the best way to give people entrance doors, and also moments of rest within the album, while remaining very coherent with this idea of making the best possible thing. And also, I hope that when they reach a certain point of the album, people get totally lost, not knowing what to expect. I hope this album put them in a state of mind open to all possibilities.

Anyway it is a less angry album, less upset against its era.

Thom : Yes, but I don't know why.

Is it more intimate because it took more time to make it?

Ed : I think that it's the time of the life that imposed itself on us. I was listening again to The Bends and I was struck to hear at what point that album was choleric, whiny, with a lot of energy, but hugely possessed by anger. There was a lot of it as well in Hail To The Thief. But for this very album [In Rainbows], anger was not the most appropriate emotion. For example, one of the things I love this time in Thom's lyrics, is their timelessness. The first lines of the song House Of Cards "I don't wanna be your friend, I wanna be your lover" could be drawn from a song by Sam Cooke, Stevie Wonder, Prince. These words hit right, in something very intimate.
Thom : Hail To The Thief was trying to start a fight, a battle. But I think that when recording In Rainbows, I was very tired of absorbing the external world within our music. And the intimate nature of this album is a kind of personal answer to a strange climate of general fear. It's our way of closing the shutters, to let the survival instinct guide us : not trusting anything else and relying only on the people around you.

Is it easy to do ? What was profoundly different this time ?
Thom : I work with what I have, I make do with what is at hand. For now, I have more than enough of the copy/paste. But also of the "stream of consciousness", of the fact of setting down my thoughts on pages and pages. This time, the first draft imposed itself most of the time. It's doubtlessly the first time that I leave it so much to my instinct. Usually, the songs take time to come out, I think a lot about their meaning. There, I tried to avoid this process and I tried to spit everything out, to make everything spurt at one stroke. What I feared with making interviews, was having to explain all these things that I actually wrote in a very spontaneous way.
Ed : There have been very similar moments to what we used to do before. But it was obvious that there were different things occurring there. And it's only afterwards, during the interviews, that I understood, by listening to Thom expressing himself, analysing himself, that he had really changed some things, but also that this time he didn't want to explain too much his lyrics. Personally, I've been very touched by the lyrics of this album, by what they tell on the human condition and how they get to universality : after all, we are not different from other people.

--Les Inrockuptibles

For example, the song about fish, "Weird Fishes/Arpeggi". People are poisoning the sea, you’re singing, where do the poor fish have to go?

Thom: You know what it is? The entire time I was busy writing, I wanted to get away from these things. I was worried about those themes entering my work. But it was just there, whether I wanted it or not. To me, the most important line on this record is the word denial in "House of Cards", because that’s what it all comes from. Denial in every possible meaning. It was the only time I was aware of that.

What you’re talking about. At the end of the song, you sing your ears should be burning. Burning with shame, no? The human race should be thoroughly ashamed.

Thom: Yeah, you could say that. But of all the lyrics I’ve ever written, I hope that the ones on this record will deliver the widest range of interpretations.

--Oor (2007)