Track Five of Ten

Radiohead put an empty room at the exact centre of Kid A, and left it there

By Rafi Mercer

The first thing that happens is that nothing does. A tone arrives from somewhere behind the speakers, low and unhurried, and for a few seconds it is difficult to tell whether it is the record or the building.

No drum. No bass. No voice. It is Ed O'Brien's guitar, processed until the word guitar stops being useful, and it sits at the dead centre of Kid A — track five of ten, three minutes and forty-two seconds, called "Treefingers".

Radiohead put this out in October 2000, after the most admired rock album of the nineties. No singles. Almost no press. A record made in large part on instruments the band could not play, on the working principle that not knowing how is a way of arriving somewhere you couldn't have planned. Half of it is not rock music at all.

And in the middle of it, deliberately, a room with nothing in it.

That is the odd grace of Kid A. It is remembered as a cold album, and the cold is real, but it is structural rather than emotional — a record about coming apart, assembled with enormous care. You hear that care most clearly where the least is happening.

Almost nobody plays track five on purpose. There is no melody to carry out of the room, nothing to sing back. It is three minutes of a band deciding the album needs somewhere to stop.

Twenty-six years on, it is the part that has aged least.

Start there. Let it run before anything else goes on.

Why does Kid A have an ambient instrumental in the middle?

Because the album needed a break in the pressure. "Treefingers" is the only track with no drums, bass or vocal, and it is sequenced almost exactly halfway through — a deliberate pause between the two densest halves of the record.

Is Kid A a good album for deep listening?

Yes, but only in sequence. Individually the tracks are difficult and the reputation for coldness sticks. Played from beginning to end, the structure does the work and the middle of the record becomes the point rather than the gap.

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