Ecriture des paroles : 1997
Répétition en soundcheck : 29 octobre 1997 (Vox Club, Nonantola) / 3 novembre 1997 (Berlin)
Travail en studio : 1999/2000
Sortie sur album : 4 juin 2001 (Amnesiac)
Version live notable: 9 juin 2001 (BBC)
Sortie sur single : 7 août 2001 ( mix plus long, Single Pyramid SOng)

Le titre sonne comme un vieux tube de jazz. Le groupe a d’ailleurs à un moment émis l’idée de l’enregistrer grâce à un vieux système pour renforcer le trait, avant de se rétracter (cf. citation infra)… Une version longue a été enregistrée pour figurer sur le maxi de Pyramid Song.

Le titre serait inspiré d’un fait divers, relaté par les tabloïds anglais, et qui aurait particulièrement marqué Thom. Il aurait ainsi voulu critiquer ce type de presse qui ne se soucie pas des conséquences que peuvent avoir leurs articles sur les personnes dont ceux-ci parlent, la presse people, à scandale, type voici chez nous. La presse aurait appris qu’un musicien en tournée avait une relation extra conjugale, et au lieu d’aller interviewer le mari volage, elle s’est précipitée chez l’épouse trompée pour recueillir ses impressions…. Celle-ci pour faire un pied de nez aux journalistes aurait acheté une centaine du magazine relatant les faits et en aurait tapissé toutes les vitres de sa maison, n’offrant aux journalistes qui l’attendaient devant chez elle que le spectacle de leur propre bêtise…

C’est exactement ce qui est dit dans la première partie de la chanson…. Comme sur OK Computer, cette chanson qui clôt l’album est écrite par Jonny.

[quote cite=”Thom Yorke / Rock&Folk,  juillet 2001″]Journaliste : « Sur Life In A Glasshouse, vous avez voulu sonner comme un big band de jazz ? »
Thom : « Non, nous aurions pu encore grossir un peu plus ce trait. Pendant un moment, nous envisagions de l’enregistrer directement sur, non pas un vinyle, mais un vieux système d’EMI qui consiste à graver directement sur disque (sur cylindre, comme dans le Dracula de Bram Stoker, ndNPA). L’idée n’était pas si judicieuse, parce qu’en elle-même, la chanson n’a pas cette couleur. Nous nous sommes contenté de la faire jouer à ces jazzmen et ça marchait très bien ainsi. Se forcer, vouloir imiter les vieux disques n’aurait pas été une bonne idée. »

Journaliste : « Les paroles s’inspirent du proverbe “People in glasshouses shouldn’t throw stones” , qui signifie : mieux vaut ne pas avoir de défaut pour critiquer les autres. Quelle est votre maison de verre ? »
Thom : « Ça ne parle pas vraiment de moi. Je me suis inspiré de la presse anglaise. En Grande-Bretagne, nous aimions la pendaison, vous c’était la guillotine. À Londres, des milliers de personnes adoraient regarder quelqu’un pendu à une corde, le voir étouffer, puis mourir. Maintenant, nous sommes plus civilisés, nous le faisons par voie de presse, nous ne tuons plus les gens, nous les mettons en couverture pour faire naître une chasse aux sorcières contre eux. C’est la chose dont j’ai le plus honte en tant qu’Anglais, ça me dégoûte. La bonne volonté qu’ils mettent à voir les autres souffrir, le plaisir qu’ils en tirent. Je me suis inspiré d’un fait divers concernant la femme d’un acteur très connu. Les journaux à scandale ont écrit qu’il l’avait trompée sur un tournage avec une jeune comédienne. Au lieu d’aller voir le mari, ils ont foncé chez la femme. La caméra et les projecteurs étaient braqués sur la résidence du couple. À peine avait-elle franchi le pas de la porte qu’ils la harcelaient de questions agressives : »Que pensez-vous de la liaison de votre mari avec cette actrice ?« Elle n’a rien pu dire et s’est enfuie. Ils l’ont retrouvée. Alors elle a décidé de commander une centaine d’exemplaires du journal en question, elle s’en est servie pour tapisser toutes ses fenêtres. Les caméras sur le perron n’avaient rien d’autre à filmer que ces couvertures. J’ai trouvé ça lumineux. Voilà d’où vient la chanson »
[/quote]
Mais comme le dit Thom, il sera vain d’essayer de tout comprendre.

[quote cite=”Thom Yorke / Mojo, juin 2001″]Q: “The words this time around: you don’t hear so many of them.”

Thom: “Oh really! Fuck! I thought I was being really clear.”

Q: “Certain lines are clear, others aren’t. It gives the music an added mystery.”

Thom: “That’s funny because the mystery is not intended. On ‘Life In A Glasshouse’ I’m desperate for people to understand all the words because they’re really important. It began after I read this interview with the wife of a very famous actor who the tabloids completely hounded for three months like dogs from hell. She got the copies of the papers with her picture and she posted them up all over the house, over all the windows so that all the cameras that were outside on her lawn only had their own images to photograph. I thought that was brilliant, and that’s where the song started from. It was just a really sad, awful story about her desperately trying to cope while he’s off filming, and the only reason she was being hounded was becouse it was rumoured he was having an affair with his leading actress. I just thought, ‘Nobody deserves this’. Especially when they’re a completely innocent party. From there, it developed into a complete rant about tabloid journalism destroying people at will, tying people to the stake and watching them burn – an activity that seems to be particularly rife in this country. It’s funny…. This is the longest we’ve actually spent in Britain since we were all about 21. For the past three years, we’ve been here most of the time. To be honest, it’s all been a bit of a shock.” (bursts out laughing)
[/quote]
Quant au débat sur “Radiohead fait-il du jazz ou pas ?”, Jonny y a répondu très vite :

[quote cite=”Jonny Greenwood / Mondosonoro, juin 2001″]

I guess that, well, we realised that we couldn’t play jazz. You know, we’ve always been a band of great ambition with limited playing abilities. So the final product you get to when you work under those expressive parameters, with those creative concepts, is something I quite like. In that sense, our main inspiration has been Miles Davis and Bitches Brew, how he and his band are capable of filling up the recording with sound from beginning to end… oh god! Now that felt sort of awkward… if a Miles Davis fan hears me talk about him that way he might get really mad at me. He’d be entitled to really. Don’t get me wrong, I have too much respect for Miles Davis. None of us plays trumpet or sax very well, we’re definitely not skilled instrumentalists. What we take from these records are things that other people may overlook, maybe things they don’t feel that passionate about. Like the chaos in those records which is fantastic… an amazing thing. And with Charles Mingus it’s utter chaos all the same, the things happening in their music and the way they happen… This kind of music that’s supposed to be, somehow classical, calmed… I don’t know, when you’re younger, you grow up picturing the image of big bands like Glenn Miller’s, and when you listen to Mingus he makes you change your perception of jazz. So jazz is a grand thing, but we’re not trying to play jazz in these songs [my question refers to ‘The National Anthem’ and ‘Life In A Glasshouse basically] but if we were we’d call ‘real’ musicians to help us out.
[/quote]
[button icon=’iconic-cd’ fullwidth=’true’] 1997 [/button]

La chanson a été écrite il y a assez longtemps, sûrement dans la période OK Computer. Le groupe l’utilisait lors des tests de son.

Sur le site officiel du groupe, parmi les nouvelles pages ajoutées, quelques uns font référence aux paroles de la chanson :

– la page syn011.html

– la page rad022.html

et sur l’une d’entre elles, on trouve même des embryons de paroles :

[quote cite=”Jonny Greenwood / “]

i swallow glass
a dream palace in the sun for stressed out executives
there are spies
pinhole cameras in every room

everybody wants a piece of windowpane
everybody wants a piece of broken glass
everybody wants a shattered piece of the windows/splinters
to show their friends
to take home with them
and watch the light turning into windows

a strange mistake to make
turn the other cheek
the sirens in the sea
i
swallow glass

uniforms
with your name on (the side of the can)
never a dull moment
he’s in charge (personnel)
freezeframed inert wandering bumping into things

well
well ofcourse id love to sit and chat
well ofcourse ide love to stay and chew the fat
well ofcourse ide love to stay and chat
but theres someone listening in
[/quote]
[button icon=’iconic-cd’ fullwidth=’true’] 29 octobre 1997 [/button]

Quelques bribes des soundchecks du concert au Vox Club de  Nonantola (Italie) , enregistrés par un bootleger de l’époque, et proposés par le webmaster de citizeninsane :

 

[button icon=’iconic-cd’ fullwidth=’true’] 3 novembre 1997 [/button]

Un cours extrait (de 1 minute 06 environ), enregistré lors de soundchecks à Berlin le 3 novembre 1997, dans une version acoustique est disponible sur « Meeting People is easy ». La chanson était déjà très délicate, elle le restera assurément.

 

[button icon=’iconic-cd’ fullwidth=’true’] décembre 1997 [/button]

Le magazine Select suit le groupe dans le but de tournée en préparation d’un article pour le numéro de janvier 1998. C’est notamment l’occasion de parler des futures chansons, et en particulier de ‘Life In a Glass House’. Thom confirme que ce n’est pas en live que le groupe réussira à en faire quelque chose…

[quote cite=”Thom Yorke / Select, janvier 1998″]Thom is handed his black acoustic guitar, and he begins to play a quite exquisite song that lies somewhere between ‘Exit Music’ and ‘Climbing Up The Walls’. “Once again”, he sings, “I’m in trouble with my only friend/She’s been smashing up my house again…living in a glass house.” His two trademark elements are in place: dreamlike fragility, along with the ability to evoke all kinds of images while using alarmingly straightforward vocabulary. And then his normal voice cuts through the music again, still Jagger-esque, but conveying an altogether more positive sentiment than before. “Fuck me!” says Thom Yorke. “That’s nice. Can we tape that?” Phil Selway – the drummer who unerringly adopts the clenched posture of a man operating highly complex machinery – has started playing behind him, dispensing a clattering, pared-down rhythm apparently pulled from the sky. As requested, it gets recorded – to be listened to, looped, and played back in the bus-based studio. Then enacting what turns out to be a daily ritual, each of the members of Radiohead cagily add their signatures to the song. Colin Greenwood goes first. Then comes Ed O’Brien, picking his way away Thom’s guitar in the manner of someone else’s flower beds. Jonny Greenwood joins in last, playing in equally hesitant fashion. The song stops, starts and eddies along for the best part of ten minutes.

“It’s sort of called ‘Life In A Glass House’, I think,” Thom says the following day. “Bits of it have been kicking around for a while. It’s not really done at all. But we won’t finish it on the road. You can’t. When you’re at a soundcheck, you’ve got people watching you, and you can’t really do what you want. It doesn’t work.” The ‘studio’, it transpires, is actually an extremely expensive stack of hardware, connected to a pair of headphones, that the group use to store work in progress and tutor themselves in the art of programming. It will not be used to record the follow-up to ‘OK Computer’, for reasons that are entirely understandable.
[/quote]

Dans le même magazine, Jonny confirme que le groupe ne sait pas encore vraiment quoi faire :

[quote cite=”Jonny Greenwood / Select, janvier 1998″]Q How many new songs have you written since ‘OK Computer’?
About eight or nine maybe. ‘Life In A Glass House’ is one of those. I don’t know how to do it, though. It could end up sounding like a bad Cure song, or it could end up sounding brilliant. It’s difficult to tell.
[/quote]
[button icon=’iconic-cd’ fullwidth=’true’] 1999-2000 [/button]

Le groupe est en studio pour enregistrer le futur album, KID A. Life In A Glass House, envisagée comme une potentielle chanson, est donc répétée.

En décembre 1999, Thom poste un message sur le message board du site radiohead.com :

[quote cite=”Thom Yorke / MB, déc. 99″]lost in the words for this. last version we did sounded like mMadness.
[/quote]
Mais impossible d’en faire quelque chose de satisfaisant. Jonny Greenwood pense donc à un homme “providentiel” : Humphrey Lyttleton, un trompettiste de jazz de plus de 70 ans. Il lui envoie une lettre pleine de politesse à laquelle est sensible Humphrey, qui apporte volontiers son concours… enfin une fois qu’il a confirmation (de sa fille) que le groupe en vaut la peine :

 

[quote cite=”BBC online Q&A / 16 juillet 2001″]Question from Paul: “Was it interesting working with Radiohead?”

Humphrey Lyttelton: “Yes Paul – it was very interesting indeed. When they asked me to bring some members of my band along and do something with them for their new CD, I had to ask my daughter who they were. I then met up with Jonny Greenwood and heard a tape of their music. And if you’ll pardon the expression, I thought to myself, “What the Hell?” – this is a kind of music new to me and it presented a challenge. In the process I got to appreciate their music and I think they got to appreciate mine and I think that can’t be bad.”[/quote]
A la fin de l’été 2000, l’enregistrement est bouclée, et la chanson sera donc peut-être sur Amnesiac (pour KID A, il est trop tard). Il aura fallu une session de 7 heures assez éprouvante pour Humphrey, venu avec quelques amis .

[quote cite=”Q Magazine / avril 2001″]Brit jazz veteran Humphrey Lyttleton helps out on new album’s free-form epic. Eight months ago, Radiohead were in the midst of the lengthy recording sessions that preceded Kid A. However, one track in particular – a predictably free-form, experimental number called Living In A Glass House – was proving tricky to complete. Unable to find a solution, guitarist Jonny Greenwood sat down and wrote a letter to the man he believed could help them out: Humphrey Lyttleton, septuagenarian jazz trumpeter and presenter of Radio 4’s long-running panel show I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue.
“It’s probably an awful cheek and we’re sure you’re very busy,” read Greenwood’s suitably deferential missive, “but we’re a bit stuck.”
Such politeness paid off and with Lyttleton’s help ‘Living In A Glass House’ was eventually completed last summer. It’s now set for release on Kid A’s successor, Amnesiac, due for release on 4 June.
“It’s wild”, says Lyttleton, sat in the dimly-lit back room of the Bull’s Head, the Barnes pub where he and his band have enjoyed a 20-year residency. “It starts with me doing a sort of ad-libbed, bluesy, minor key meandering, then it gradually gets so that we’re sort of playing real wild, primitive, New Orleans blues stuff.”
He lifts his trumpet and gives Q a short blast by way of explanation. “Skronnnk!” Inevitably, Lyttleton, who during the 1950s was at the forefront of the trad jazz movement in Britain, had never heard of Radiohead before their collaboration. After borrowing OK Computer from his daughter and a brief meeting with Greenwood, the trumpet master and his usual quintet joined the rest of the band in a recording studio in Bayswater.
“People had said that they were all crazy but in fact we had a good time”, he says. But it took a while for both parties to get familiarized.
“Nobody knew what anybody was going to do!” says Lyttleton. “They didn’t want it to sound like a slick studio production but a slightly exploratory thing of people playing as if they didn’t have it all planned out in advance. However, I detected some sort of eye-rolling at the start of the session, as if to say we were miles apart. They went through quite a few nervous breakdowns during the course of it all, just through trying to explain to us all what they wanted.
Thom Yorke’s behaviour was especially curious.
“Thom was doing his vocals and he’d have vanished from view altogether”, says Lyttleton. “He’d be sitting cross-legged in some sort of meditative posture at the bottom of the vocal booth.” The session lasted seven hours, leaving Lyttleton exhausted.
“My chops were getting in a very ragged state,” he says. “So when we finally got a take that sounded good to me, they said, ‘Good, we’ll go and have some food, then we’ll come back and do some more’. I said, ‘Not me’. It was a very heavy day.” Yorke recently described Amnesiac as “the sound of what it feels like to be standing in the fire”. The album was recorded at the same time as Kid A but, according to the singer, “it comes from a different place” and is reputed to be more accessible than its predecessor. But if ‘Living In A Glass House’ is anything to go by, Yorke’s lyrics may still be of the lemon sucking variety.
“The words are very surreal, rather like Procul Harem’s ‘Whiter Shade Of Pale'”, says Lyttleton, who received a letter of thanks from the band. “I wouldn’t compare them, because I think Thom’s are slightly better, but they’re coming from the same sort of area.

[/quote]
Voilà un autre extrait de presse qui insiste sur l’étrangeté de l’enregistrement… et de ses participants.

[quote cite=”Mojo / juin 2001″]And ‘Life In A Glasshouse’, the album’s finale, can be very hard going indeed, at least to begin with. Imagine Thom Yorke singing at a New Orleans funeral serenaded by Humphrey Lyttelton and a similarly grizzled-looking horn-playing chum of his who – according to Jonny Greenwood – had been let out of hospital, after undergoing open-heart surgery, the day before the session.

[/quote]
[button icon=’iconic-cd’ fullwidth=’true’] 5 janvier 2001 [/button]

En interview sur une radio australienne, Ed nous laisse penser qu’on pourrait retrouver la chanson sur le prochain album.

[quote cite=”Rolling Stone / 5 janvier 2001”]

In a recent interview on Australian radio station Triple J, guitarist Ed O’Brien compared the album to the band’s 1995’s The Bends. Several of the album’s songs were recorded during the Kid A sessions. And while a full track listing has not been confirmed, a song titled ‘Po Pad’ will be the album’s first song. ‘Pyramid Song (a.k.a. Egyptian Song)’ and ‘Living in a Glass House’, two songs that the band had played earlier this year, will also be included on the album. The latter features a special guest appearance by British jazz writer and musician Humphrey Lyttleton.
[/quote]
[button icon=’iconic-cd’ fullwidth=’true’] 4 juin 2001 [/button]

Et effectivement, la chanson fait la fermeture de l’album Amnesiac :

[button icon=’iconic-cd’ fullwidth=’true’] 9 juin 2001 [/button]

En raison de son arrangement compliqué, la chanson est rarement jouée en live, ou alors dans des cas exceptionnels, comme ici à la télévision, le 9 juin 2001 sur la BBC1 :

 

 

[quote cite=”Colin Greenwood Hail To The Thief release party, juin 2003″]Oh, brilliant! It’s like, we did that BBC2 thing, didn’t we? And it was live. And it was like every boy’s dream to be on that public broadcast thing in this country. And it was just amazing, with Humphrey Littleton and all these amazing players, and it was just a privilege to be there with them.[/quote]
En concert “classique”, elle ne sera jouée jamais jouée avec Humphrey, pourtant le concert du 7 juillet 2001 à Oxford présentait une occasion unique de le faire, puisqu’Humphrey et son BIG Band étaient présents et ont joué en début d’après-midi devant les 42 000 spectateurs.

Une photo de presse d’Humphrey, posant avec un tee-shirt du groupe :

 

[button icon=’iconic-cd’ fullwidth=’true’] 7 août 2001 [/button]

Une version plus longue a été mixée et figure sur un single pyramid song.