Début 2002, Thom envoie aux autres musiciens de Radiohead le CD démo de quelques chansons qu’il a enregistrées tout seul et qu’il verrait bien sur le prochain album. Go To Sleep s’y trouve certainement.

Une page du carnet de Thom sera postée sur le site radiohead.com, partie scrapbook. Elle présente le travail d’écriture du Thom :

On retrouve 4 lignes de la chanson :
[quote ]somebody’s mother
somebody’s son
somebody’s daugther
somebody’s father
[/quote]

Rien de bien profond, mais justement, c’est ce que Thom voulait. Ne surtout pas se prendre la tête, et avoir à penser aux conséquences que peuvent avoir des paroles, comme c’était le cas pour les derniers albums :

Cd officiel d’interview, avril 2003 :
[quote ]I think that was a payback from the Kid A/Amnesiac thing, where I think in a way I was quite shocked about how suddenly… you know, the way everybody interpreted about this big sort of left turn deliberately or whatever, whereas to me it didn’t really feel like that. It was sort of logical progreesion. But obviously not, or something, I don’t know. So I was like ’ok, I’m just not gonna think about this at all from my point of view’. So when I was writing the lyrics, it was sort of… whatever was coming out of my mouth, if I thought it was half decent I’d make a note of it. And then ’Go To Sleep’ was like… it was literally whatever was coming out of my mouth. And I just had a look at it in the end, and to me it was nonsense all the way through, and I was like ’it’s ok’. You know, much of the lyrics on this record I’d say ’Obviously I’ll rewrite this in the end, chaps. At the moment this is just nonsense.’ And they were going ’Really ? Ok’. And that was one where it was all kind of… at the time I thought it was complete nonsense. And then it turned into this really amazing thing, that, to be honest, wasn’t me, really. Didn’t feel like me at all. In fact I’ve done it, which is great. I mean, that’s how I remember when I first started writing songs, when we first were in the band as well, that’s how I remember doing it. I think you get all this baggage over the years, that comes up through the analysis and stuff. And you start like worrying about the consequences of what you might say in this track or that track. And it ultimately ends up being bollocks, really. And also, I mean, I think Kid A and Amnesiac were born out of that. The way I was trying to write there was a way of trying to deal with that. Whereas this time it was like ’whatever, I’m not interested what the consequences of this are’, you know. ’This is just what I do today. Gotta get home at lunchtime anyway’.[/quote]

En mai-juin, le groupe est en studio pour travailler sur les nouvelles chansons du futur album et les répéter.

Pour Go To Sleep, le groupe a quelques difficultés sur les arrangements :

[quote cite=”Phil” cite=”C.M.J., juin 2003″]that was probably the track that we were having the most difficulty with arranging during pre-production, and then on the touring.[/quote]

Thom confirmera ce début difficile dans Musikexpress en juillet 2003 :

[quote cite=”Thom Yorke / “]Q : « Which song took the least time ? »

Thom : « ’We Suck Young Blood’ was easy and ’The Gloaming’ and ’Backdrifts’ were finished pretty fast. ’Where I End And You Begin’ was a nightmare. ’Go To Sleep’ was an even greater nightmare. (giggles) With that we thought for a while that we would never get it going and now it’s one of the songs I am most proud of. But for six months it was some kind of very, very awful Westcoast-Rock-thing, while we kept just looking at each other like : ’What are we doing here ? This is awful !’ »[/quote]

Le groupe part aussitôt en tournée pour tester ce qu’il vient de répéter. La chanson est jouée pour la première fois le 23 juillet 2002 à Lisbonne, au Coliseu dos Recreios, puis autres deux fois lors de la tournée d’été. Ces premières versions sont encore très embryonnaires. Les paroles ne sont pas fixes et changent régulièrement.

Version du 24 juillet, à Lisbonne également :
[dewplayer:http://www.radiohead.fr/wp-content/uploads/2014/IMG/mp3/gotosleep.mp3]

Le groupe a bien conscience que ces premières versions live ne sont pas terribles :

[quote cite=”Thom Yorke / Cd officiel d’interview, avril 2003 “]A few times, that we played it live to people, it was just this embarrassing sort of guitar noodle thing, that just didn’t really work out or would just collapse halfway through, it was aweful. But we sort of kept going, and kept going.[/quote]

Suite à ces premières versions, Thom ajuste les paroles. La preuve avec cette page que l’on retrouvera un peu plus tard sur le site radiohead.com, et que Thom a écrite le 23 juillet 2002, à l’hôtel avant ou après un concert à Porto :

Le groupe passe 15 jours au studio Ocean Way Recording à Los Angeles avec Nigel Godrich pour enregistrer l’album. C’est un peu la fête… même si quelques unes des chansons de l’album seront enregistrées là.

Thom décide de ne pas trop se prendre la tête pour les paroles de ’Go To Sleep’, et il pense même avoir eu raison de procéder ainsi :

[quote cite=”Thom Yorke / NME, 3 mai 2003″]Thom : « With most of the lyrics, like the ones on ’Go To Sleep’, I was thinking, ’Well, this is obviously all nonsense, I’ll have to rewrite it’. Then there we were in the studio in the day of recording and I hadn’t rewritten it yet, so it was, ’Right, that’ll have to be it.’ And now I look at it, they’re the lyrics I’m most proud of. They’re involuntary, there was no mandate, no trying to make a statement, but obviously somewhere in the back of my head it was happening. »[/quote]

[quote cite=”Thom Yorke / XFM, printemps 2003″]And the words to this were pretty much written all the way down the line ‘ok, I’ll change all of these at one point, because this is all nonsense, blah, blah, blah’. And then [it] actually ended up in the studio and it’s like, ‘Ok, now we’re gonna do this one.’ ‘Ok, I need to rewrite the words’. And then reading through the words I’d got in the notes and discovering that I’d actually got something really coherent, without actually having really made the effort to do it, or rather, I couldn’t see it. So it’s actually the lyrics I’m most proud of on the record, I think.[/quote]

La fin du travail d’enregistrement, et le mixage se fera avec plus de sérieux dans le studio du groupe dans l’Oxfordshire entre la fin 2002 et mars 2003.

Autant Phil n’aimait pas trop les premiers arrangements de la chanson, autant cette fois, il est content :
[quote cite=”Phil Selway / C.M.J., juin 2003″]I’m really happy with the way ‘Go To Sleep’ turned out, because that was probably the track that we were having the most difficulty with arranging during pre-production, and then on the touring. I think it was a good measure of how much we’ve come on as musicians – that within the space of a day in the studio, we had actually thrown together a good arrangement.[/quote]

Concernant l’effet à la fin de la chanson, Jonny l’a expliqué lors de la fête de sortie de l’album :

[quote cite=”Jonny Greenwood / “]We’re starting to play with computers and write stuff for them, that does things like that. So it’s like, we’re still using computers, but we’re getting rid of other people’s programs, in a way, and building really wonky kind of broken pieces of software like that one, that makes that noise and then crashes a computer. So, it’s fun, yeah, we’re into it.[/quote]

Le rapprochement avec ce solo de guitare, en particulier la façon dont il sera joué en live, est souvent fait avec une chanson de 1980 des Talking Heads où Adrian Belew fait la même chose :

En avril 2003, dans le CD officiel d’interview, Colin explique que ce travail sur l’effet de guitare a tiré tout le travail d’enregistrement :

[quote cite=”Colin Greenwood ” avatar=”http://www.radiohead.fr/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/colin05-150×150.jpg”]For me, what summed the record up was a track called ’Go To Sleep’, which we were rehearsing. And it’s got a sort of folky first half, and then it sort of grooves out in the second half. And we had this great sort of 1960s English sort of folk, I don’t know, west coast thing going, early garfunkel, first half. It was brilliant. And then we couldn’t have an outro, so then we just played it through and recorded it like in one take. And it sounded great, but we sort of lost the first half of the song. What I’m saying is, people didn’t come into the studio with like ’this is how everything should sound, and if it’s not gonna sound like this then I’m going to throw my toys out’, or just freak out or not be happy or… You know, everyone was like very ’well, if it didn’t work out, that’s fine’. because everyone was relaxed about it. We created a space for something unexpected, and it’s good or sometimes better to replace it.[/quote]

Alors qu’ « Hail To The Thief » ne doit sortir qu’une dizaine de semaines plus tard, une version « pirate », sortie du studio, envahit l’internet.

[dewplayer:http://www.radiohead.fr/wp-content/uploads/2014/IMG/mp3/GoToSleep.mp3]

Quelques semaines plus tard, avec le recul, on comprendra que cette version ne présentait bien souvent pas les versions définitives des chansons, mais celles de février, alors que le mixage n’était pas terminé.

Dans le cas de go to sleep, les modifications sont légères, et surtout sur la fin.

La chanson figure sur « Hail To The Thief » avec le titre alternatif de « Little Man Being Erased »

A propos de ce titre, XFM, printemps 2003 :
[quote cite=”Thom Yorke / “]‘Little man being erased’ is an animation that Stanley did, which is gonna be on the website probably. That was again another possible title for the record, which is nice but didn’t fit.
[/quote]

La presse française n’est pas bien convaincue…

[quote cite=”Les Inrocks” cite=”numéro du 11 au 17 juin 2003″]La chanson est plus classique, plus pop que le reste de l’album. Un bon moment donc, mais le groupe ne s’est pas attardé sur le style.[/quote]

Toujours dans le même magazine :
[quote cite=”Les Inrocks” cite=”numéro du 11 au 17 juin 2003″]Je crois que comme d’habitude le disque part dans toutes les directions : nous sommes en fait décidément bien incapables de développer une idée tout au long d’un même disque, et encore moins au sein d’une seule chanson. j’imagine Go To Sleep déclinée sur tout un album : là, on commencerait à s’emmerder sec ![/quote]

Deux singles de promotion de la chanson sortent :

CD1 :
1. Go To Sleep
2. I Am Citizen Insane
3. Fog (3 juillet 2003, Le Reservoir, Paris)

CD2 :
1. Go To Sleep
2. Gagging Order
3. I Am a Wicked Child

Pour mettre l’accent sur la promotion de la chanson, un clip sort.

Composition de l’équipe de production :

Production Company : Black Dog Films Ltd
Producteur : John Payne
Directeur : Alex Rutterford
maison de disque : Parlophone
Commissioner : Dilly Gent

The Mill : Production : Stephen Venning, Shannon Hall, Satoko Iinuma.
3d team : Ben Smith, Robert Kolbeins, Jordi Bares, Rob van den Bragt, Russell Tickner, Hitesh Patel, Andrew Proctor, Rob Petrie, Ivor Griffin, Tom Bussell, Ludovic Walsh, Paul Taylor, Jan Walter, Dave Levy
Flame team : Led by Dave Birkill ; Neil Davies, Jason Watts, Paul Marangos, Adam Grint, Lorraine McLaughlin, Daniel Morris, Gavin Wellsman

 

[quote ]Q : « Now did you shoot anything for it, and then they just put the CGI over you ? »

Thom : « I had to do that sort of… uh… »

Q : « Where they put the ping-pong balls over you ? »

Thom : « On your face ! It was horrible. It was about 60 of them on my face »

Colin : « Weird ! Those ESP sort of things » Thom : « Yeah. Stuck with glue… very strange. Very profound. Very… the weirdest video shoot I’ve ever been on because there was no video cameras. Uh, there was a director. All it was was a bunch of infrared sensors and people walking around in the silliest bubble suits you’ve ever seen in your life walking up and down doing all the crowd scenes, like, this girl and this guy doing all of the people in the crowd one by one. Very strange… »[/quote]
(MTV2 Subterranean, 14 novembre 2003)

Cette fois, on l’a compris : Radiohead a définitivement pris le parti pris de l’utilisation de la 3D. Ici non lissée / non mapée et soutenue par une lumière froide qui donne un cachet particulier au court métrage elle laisse admirer le gros boulot d’animation de foule. Mais le problème avec ce genre d’animation, c’est que ça devient vite dépassé.

Encore une fois, une drôle d’histoire qui met un Thom virtuel en action… Assi sau milieu d’un square imaginaire, il peut sentir autour de lui la vie s’agiter, grossir…

[quote cite=”Thom Yorke”]”i had to wear the stupidest bobbly node suit. there were no cameras just infrared scanning light things. it was very strange. but oh yes thats me. i was mapped into it. from the movement data and hi res scans. much like TRON. bye bye. thom”.

[/quote]

The Mill a également réalisé la vidéo de Pull/Pulk like revolving doors. Voici le rapport complet sur le site de The Mill :
(Allez ! Faites l’effort de lire ça en anglais, et vous saurez tout tout tout sur le clip !).

[quote ]

It’s All Rocks That Roll In Radiohead’s Latest Promo Aug 05 2003 – Competing in the music industry is tough work. Quite often an amazing promo coupled with a great track can propel the song/promo package into the limelight. Radiohead’s fantastic new release together with staggering CG, completed by The Mill for their music video, is such a combination, destined for chart-topping success. The video, Directed by Alex Rutterford of Black Dog/RSA, features a virtually generated Thom Yorke performing the bands latest release ‘Go to Sleep’. The fully animated clip is set in a fictional, regency style, town square. The promo opens on a red flower, the only colour used in this largely monochromatic film. The flower moves gently to the opening bars of the track as Yorke sits on a park bench in the middle of the square. Office workers storm past going about their mundane routines unaware of Yorke sitting on the bench. As the track builds up, the location begins to dramatically transform. One by one the buildings surrounding the square begin to self-destruct and turn to rubble. Oblivious to this, the crowds of people continue to go about their daily grind, unaffected by the falling masonry. As Yorke’s performance builds, the strewn rubble of the fallen buildings begins to reform itself into an almost Bauhaus style of building – flat roofs, smooth facades and cubic shapes. The historic and opulent regency style façade is replaced with flat faced, concrete, modern architecture. Throughout this transition people walk straight past buildings without noticing a change, their route un-deterred, their focus directly on the path ahead. The promo ends as it began with the camera pulling back to reveal the red flower. The style of the film is photo realistic in movement combined with stylised polygonal faceted textures in look. Yorke is therefore fully realistic in his performance, while at the same time being a stylised version of himself. The buildings have no real texture, yet the dynamics of their collapse mimic reality and an actual demolition.

Around twenty Mill professionals, both 3D and 2D, worked for approximately eight weeks to build and animate the final promo. The process began with Director Alex Rutterford’s lo-fi CG animatic, which entailed the video. The Mill team then used this as a guide to build on, updating the animatic with the latest scenes as they developed. Along side this, some of The Mill CG team set about modelling the various buildings, both old and new. In the mean time, others were responsible for the animated characters that were to inhabit the environment. These were split into two areas : generating the crowd characters ; and of course, Yorke himself. Finally, all the CG elements were combined, lit and rendered before various layers of CG were composited in flame to create the finished film. Yorke’s’s character was one of the trickiest and technically difficult areas of the promo to complete. Once his stylistic look was established, Thom Yorke himself was required for a very technical shoot and scanning day. Firstly Yorke’s head was scanned in several poses to generate a very accurate CG model of his head. His movements and performance were then captured using motion capture. The first part of the process recorded his body movements, the second, concentrated on his face, with Yorke wearing around seventy markers on his face alone. This raw material was then combined and finessed using actual video performance of Yorke and Radiohead, to create the virtual but realistic performance seen by Yorke in the promo.

To generate complex crowd scenes, The Mill’s team were able to use new beta software ‘Massive’ – originally designed for the large crowd scenes in Lord of the Rings – commercially for the first time. Massive allows the animator to generate crowds of people that have virtual interactive intelligence. Each character was initially animated using motion captured walk cycles and movements. Massive then gives the individuals their own little brains to detect such things as terrain, so in this case the curbs and pavements. It also allows them to detect other individuals, so allowing them to realistically avoid each other. This means complicated interacting crowd scenes of infinite sizes can be created. While several of the periphery characters in the crowd scenes were hand animated, Massive was used to generate the large groups of people needed to fill the square. Once the modelling of the buildings were complete, Mill animators set about creating the dynamics to allow them to be both destroyed then rebuilt in a different form. Rutterford was keen to get a very realistic feel for the buildings that were to break and crumble.

Therefore, the Mill CG team used reference material from real demolitions and destructions as a guide to their animations. They then created the deconstructions using a combination of hand animation and computer dynamic simulations combined with layered particle animation effects. In lighting the final piece, the team used its in-house written light dome shader, to give the film a very ambient realistic lighting feel. This enabled them to create the realistic shadowing and light fall-off seen in the film. Extra details were also added to Yorke’s face in several shots to create the low poly look created by a mesh reduction technique. This was achieved using a plug-in developed by Mill 3D’s R&D team. The finished rendered animation passes were then combined in Flame. Live action smoke and dust was composited onto the buildings to enhance the illusion of them collapsing and rebuilding. The flame team added drama to the darker scenes by adding light emissions to the streetlights, along with smoothing out the transitions from solid buildings to cracked ones. They also finessed areas such as depth of field and adding of subtle motion blur to Yorke’s movement to enhance his performance. The final touch that Mill Flame operators worked on was creating the camera shake effect as the buildings collapse. This significantly helped to increase the scale of the impact and weight of the CG in these scenes. The finished film is one of high audiovisual impact. If Yorke’s realness both in form and performance doesn’t absorb the viewer then the dramatic changes occurring in the background bound to stir viewers’ emotions.”

[/quote]

Le single « Go To Sleep » (Parlophone Parlophone CDRS 6613) atteint cette semaine son meilleur classement des ventes avec la 12^e place.

http://www.officialcharts.com/artis…

Radiohead offre une nouvelle chanson à Warchildmusic.com, comme ils l’avaient déjà fait avec ‘Lucky’ pour l’album HELP : un remix de ‘Go To Sleep’, dit ‘Butts mix’, par Jonny Greenwood à partir de la version live de ‘Go To Sleep’ enregistrée à Osaka l’année précédente. Le remix peut être acheté £0,99 sur warchildmusic.com.