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“Harrowdown Hill” – Thom Yorke
(Words/music: Thom Yorke, available on The Eraser, XL Recordings 2006)

In interviews around the time The Eraser came out, Thom Yorke alternately acknowledged, denied, and distanced himself from the inspiration for “Harrowdown Hill.”  I’m not as interested in pinning down the subject as I am by Yorke’s statement about the song’s evolution.  “It’s one of those really odd things where I wrote half the lyrics before considering what I was writing about.  It happened over a long period of time.  By osmosis, these things were going on and they ended up in the tune.”  I’m not really interested in Yorke acknowledging or distancing himself from David Kelly, a British chemical weapons expert found dead in a mysterious manner, because that’s not what the song is “about.”  If Kelly was the inspiration for the song, Yorke moved it beyond a factual report of the situation and tapped into the underlying emotions.

Yorke’s lyrics with Radiohead touched on ideas of paranoia, detachment, and recognition of a dark undercurrent, yet he called “Harrowdown Hill” the “most angry song I’ve ever written in my life.” His anger, in this case, comes from exasperation.  The “we think the same things at the same time / we just can’t do anything about it” comes from the same place as the Orwellian visions in Radiohead’s songs, but Yorke seems more focused on the inability to act against these forces rather than the things he detests.  If Yorke felt incredulous before at the things he saw in society, he’s rendered speechless by the methods used to perpetuate the cycle.  In that sense, it’s no wonder Yorke wants to distance himself from the song’s origins, lest he go back down that rabbit hole of frustration and anger again.

More on Thom Yorke: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm