The Story of Radiohead's Best Song

i'm a fucking idiot, i got acoustic/electric mixed up with analogue/digital and it PISSES ME OFF. i also got the key signature wrong because apparently i'm a dumb dumb internet boy who hasnt been a musician for almost twenty years. please forgive my mistakes.

this is my favourite song of all time and i hope this video has done it justice

sources:

#Radiohead #HowToDisappearCompletely #ThomYorke

[TalkingWithTom]

please watch my other videos thank you <3

[ozxbedw]

“i’m not living, i’m just killing time” hits way harder i think especially for how much more subdued it is

[walrus]

'It's over. Suddenly, everything is in its right place.'

nice

[TomaszOdkrywca]

You say the listener is left exhausted at the end. I'd argue, that if you're in pain, you feel soothed at the end. Radiohead songs are "sad", yes. However, listening to them somehow "validates" my experience. I feel as if the music is telling me that what I am living through is real, its ok and Im not the only one, even if I am alone. Through that validation, comes an underlying peace. The blissful feeling akin to a cool towel on a scorching day.

[shivagni]

I grew up on Radiohead, being a male and experiencing sexual abuse with an adult at age 11, it was all I had, I was the class clown, I was seemingly the happiest kid and made everyone laugh and got in trouble constantly. Having this song, this band IMO the greatest band on this planet, was what keep me from ending myself. I was able to surrender and disappear completely into my emotions and feelings. At that age, I was seen as a victim, everyone I knew found out, people used my experience and made it their own and talked about it without my consent, I just wanted to be swallowed whole and return to source. I would come home after school and cry whilst I listened to my beloved Radiohead, the only one that understood what I was feeling. So haunting, so painful, so beautiful and poetic. I am so happy that life brought me to them because it carried me, yes, in perpetual sadness but alive and well. Thank you Radiohead for sharing your pain, it carried and shaped me. I love you so much.

[barryoriordan]

That Dublin gig in 1997 was such a treat, Massive Attack and Radiohead were amazing. Unforgettable was at the end of an fantastic Radiohead set, when it was supposed to rain that day and didn’t, Tom came back on stage to play an encore and said this is for it not raining today and played high and dry. As soon as he started playing, it started raining. Unbelievable.

[SrGotasDeChuva]

So happy he is alive... Must be difficult to pass through all that pressure.

[phalanx]

How to Disappear Completely has always given me a vibe of depression and longing for normality.

[girlwithaguitar]

As someone who experiences depression and disassociative episodes, How to Disappear Completely is the first song I've ever heard that captures my exact feelings of feeling alone and not really part of the world around you. The tense strings in the back of the mix. The absolute apathy that the lyrics are delivered with. The way how when you listen to it you feel weightless. Fucking amazing song.

[undertowboomer]

I'm a metal head. Thom Yorke is the greatest songwriter of my generation. Such a heavy, heavy song.

[Psilocybin]

I used to listen to Pink Floyd's "Shine on You Crazy Diamond" the 17 minute edited version, along with "How To Disappear Completely", as I fell asleep. So magical.

[charles-mroz]

KID A came out as my marriage was falling to pieces. I worked alone all day and listened to the album constantly. My home life was a nightmare and I completely lost any feeling of self worth I hung on for dear life because I couldn't conceive of a situation where I wouldn't be there with my daughters. The music, the lyrics even the cover art resonated perfectly with how I was feeling and it became the soundtrack to my eventual collapse. I couldn't listen to it for years and then a couple of years ago I passed Cobb records on the way hone and bought ok computer and Kid A. I was fine until I got to this track and then I had to park up because I was crying so much I couldn't see where I was going.Life is good now but I think I learned that there are some things that you shouldn't expect to get over. You go on for sure but you are changed forever.

[JasonWindsor]

‘How to disappear completely’ & ‘nude’ have been competing in my head for my favorite Radiohead song for at least 10 years now... this song is a masterwork

[inlimboxyu]

How to Disappear is the one Radiohead song that I NEVER listen to. Every time, and I mean every time, I hear it I cry. I cried just now hearing clips of it in the video. This song hits on something in me that feels like absolute suicidal despair. It breaks my heart. It is a beautiful song that perfectly, at least to me, captures the misery machine that is a a deep deep depression. I love it and I hate it. It's the only song I've ever heard that affects me in this way.

[DarkeyyXV]

This song means more to me than any other song. It may seem very "childish" to some, but here's my story: When i was about 16, I can truly say i fell in love with a girl. I quickly realized it wasn't just going to be some highschool hook-up. No matter our differences, i kept falling deeper and deeper into love & emotion. It lasted about 4 years, spending every waking moment with someone. We became helpless romantics, even though we were so different and had so much confliction, until she snapped one day, and called it quits. For the first half of my senior year, while everyone was having the time of their life, I was alone. I knew my friends weren't going to stay when we graduated, and i lost all love i used to feel. All i could do was listen to this song with my headphones in through the whole winter. I'd just stand around during lunch and brunch listening to this just wanting to give up. Eventually, after an incredibly dark winter, i found my way out. I always reflect on this time period. things are better now.

[analogmatrix]

Thom Yorke bears his soul on his sleeve and is the embodiment of what a real musician should be. If humanity is ever judged I vote Thom as one of our main advocates.

[sgorneau]

I love how the bass line seems like it shouldn't work at all but just dances around the strings like its taunting them.

[ChuckWasHere]

I was listening to Kid A on my way into work on 9/11/2001. How to Disappear Completely had just started when I shut off my vehicle and went into work, so it was the first song I heard while driving home that terrible day. Listening to it while seeing all the sad, confused faces on my way home will be etched in my memory forever.

[siobhanphoenix]

Trigger Warnings: It's amazing that he chose this song from the album Kid A. In the early early 2000s after I had gotten this album so much bad had happened. This album and this song was what I was listening to after my boyfriend had disappeared. After he came back he had checked himself into the hospital and was put into the psychiatric ward. I was alone in our apartment feeling more alone than ever all while I was blamed for his depression and all that was going on. It was a freezing cold and bleak January and then I got extremely sick not knowing what it was. I went to emergency and when I was asked if there was anyone for them to contact I told them my boyfriend was in the psychiatric ward. Then as I writhed in extreme pain on the table they sent a man in who treated me like a criminal. That I was faking the pain to just be close to my boyfriend. Finally through the pain I was able to say to him something along the lines of " Do you really think that I am faking throwing up bile??" They kept me in emergency for a bit and then sometime late a nurse was shocked and indignant that I was still there because I had supposedly been released. I was scared but I got up out of the bed. As soon as I stood I knew something wasn't right. I got dressed and got my things. I got a taxi home all the while knowing I was better off at the hospital. As soon as I was at my apartment door opening it I had the extreme pain in spasms. It continued for weeks with me on the couch constantly. I couldn't eat or prepare myself anything. The only thing I ate was crackers for weeks and water. When I was finally taken somewhat seriously by my boyfriends family his aunt who had been a nurse brought me packages of electrolyte solution believing I had a bad flu. I continued to be alone and in pain sleeping when I could and waking up from the pain. The pain was enough that I had to make noise. I got better but it came back again and this time when my boyfriend had been released from the psychiatric ward. While I was sick and alone the nurses told him to not leave to come help me and he listened to them which I was angry about. But when I started getting sick again not long after I started feeling better I was at emergency again. This time they admitted me to the hospital and did many tests. They even gave me my own room. The way they treated me the second time I always thought they did because they were trying to cover their asses to not be taken to court. I had had an ovarian cyst which was positioned in such a way that my uterus had prolapsed to the left and everything was blocked. And it was positioned in such a way that it had been hard to see when they did the ultrasound. After I was kept in the hospital and I was clear to go home I may have listened to this album and this song sometimes but when I did it just brought back too many of the horrible, dark and stinging feelings that were still quite fresh. Since then I haven't listened to it. Watching this video was the first time I had heard this song since then and it takes me back more than twenty years to a time that oddly enough had been the biggest nightmare of my life even after living in a broken home with a very severely mentally ill mother. I love Radiohead but I know I have avoided listening to this album for a reason. It expresses the feelings of a human soul that usually can never be expressed in words. The intense grief of aloneness, isolation, rejection, of being let down by life, of abandonment and of being unloved and hated and blamed. This song was majorly triggering for me and now I have to do what I can to process it as I have all my life. I wish and pray for peace on everyone who found themselves and their pain in this song the way that I have.

[anaformiaabalatusdispositi]

I was there at that gig in 1997. I'd been dumped weeks before. It was the usual story: I liked her, she didn't like me. Which was disappointing because she spent considerable time telling me she did like me, which is how we ended up together.

One of the first things I bought her was Radiohead's The Bends. The instant classic. I thought she'd be as into that idea of being isolated, together, as I did but I was wrong. It was an omen for me because if she didn't like that then it was hard to imagine that below the powerful emotions I was feeling that underneath it all we really had anything in common, or that we really knew each other at all.

Weeks later we split up and I was alone and I started telling friends I wanted to go to Glastonbury. It was pretty sad because I was going to continue living that relationship in my imagination. I hitched there across England alone feeling the experience would be cathartic and I remember standing in the crowd in the rain watching their famous 1997 Glastonbury concert in a huge crowd but all by myself. Thom shouted at the lighting engineer to turn the light onto the crowd se he could see us.

It definitely felt like being part of something. Thom made it clear it meant something to him, and the crows made it clear it meant something to us, and it meant something to me. It was felt, it was meant.

During No Surprises a fireworks display started far in the distance in I have never been completely sure if it was part of the gig or it just happened that way.

All I had to do after the concert was finished was work out how to get home. I had left the people I'd hitched with in a car in the queue to get in realising I'd be faster walking than they would be and I was ready to do it by myself. I never saw those people again after I got out of the car.