Alors qu’il est tout petit, Thom aime bien la façon dont le mot « myxomatosis » sonne :

Spin, juin 2003 :
[quote ]« I remember my parents pointing out all these dead rabbits on the road when I was a kid, » Yorke says. « I didn’t know that much about the virus, or even how to spell it. But I loved the word. I love the way it sounded. The song is actually about mind control. I’m sure you’ve experienced situations where you’ve had your ideas edited or rewritten when they didn’t conveniently fit into somebody else’s agenda. And then – when someone asks you about those ideas later – you can’t even argue with them, because now your idea exists in that edited form. »[/quote]

A l’époque où il était à l’Université, Thom écrivait de petites histoires, que bien évidemment il ne publiera jamais, mais qu’il découpera ensuite et gardera comme inspiration. Et il y a bien de ça dans Myxomatosis avec cette histoire de chat hybride…

XFM, printemps : 2003
[quote ]Thom : « It’s actually a short story kind of thing that I wrote and then cut up. And I never write short stories. About the only one I’ve ever written. I used to write them at University. In fact, I managed to blag my way on a course for creative writing on University, just because I didn’t want to do Spencer. What was his name ? Spencer… yeah, something like that. Very old, very big, thick book. I was not having any of that. Anyway, where am I ? (…) »[/quote]

Du 18 au 20 juin 1999, le 25^e G8 se tient à Cologne, sous la direction de Schröder. Vous allez me dire, mais quel rapport avec Myxomatosis, eh bien Thom l’explique dans le « Official Hail to the Thief Interview CD » d’avril 2003 :
[quote ]Thom : « A lot of that was experiencing being on the outskirts of the whirling vacuum, which is current politics, really. When you get to the center, or you start to sort of see the center, you know, like a tornado, there’s just basically nothing there. And ’Myxomatosis’ was really sort of born out of that. Born out of this idea like… well, again I guess, like ’Punch-up’ as well, it’s like ’well, I was there, and no, it wasn’t like that’. But yet… I must be ill, because what I saw and what was reported was a totally different thing. Very specifically provoked by something that happened a few years ago, the ’Drop The Debt’ thing, that just stuck with me when we went to Cologne. I mean, I’ve talked about this before, how all these nice old ladies and quakers and stuff were all there protesting the G7 or 8… I can never remember who they dumped off last. We handed in this petition with millions of signatures, or whatever, to Schröder at this thing in Cologne. And there was a small riot… there’s a protest, that turned into a riot, back in London. Reclaim The Streets were involved in all that, I’m quite sure they weren’t involved with the rioting. But somehow the British press, obviously the Murdoch papers in particular, because they love this sort of shit, were just writing it up as if all these old ladies and all these nice quakers were somehow anti-capitalist lunatics – and it was all part of the same coordinated protest – which was just nonsense, you know. And the whole thing was just written up so badly and everyone was ignoring the fact, that there was actually millions of people’s fixed signatures on this thing. It was… I don’t know. It just stuck with me how utterly powerless people are to really represent what goes on, if other people elsewhere see fit… if they see a nicer and more convenient story to be written another way, they can write off the wishes of millions of people in a split second at editorial decision, which I feel is immoral. »[/quote]

On retrouve ce texte sur de nombreuses pages du nouveau site radiohead.com :

we boild the head we dug into the meat he did some of his card tricks he shook hands with the excluded gave them all some promises his smiles must be made of high tensile plastic . he said : oh man it was so nice she ate me up for breakfast i slept with hoo i like i sat in the cupboard and wrote it down neet just as ah saw it yeah just as ah saw it but it got edited fuctup strangled/beaten up

Sortie de KID A, 4^e album du groupe. Certains CDs contiennent un livret caché avec des textes très influencés politiquement, dont cette page qui reprend une partie du texte de 1999 :

Le reste du groupe écoute le travail de Thom, et ils sont tous très excités, même si pour Myxomatosis, ils savent qu’il faut refaire l’arrangement… La première session de travail a lieu début février.

Hail To The Thief release party, 10 juin 2003
[quote ]Thom : « The day I know how the others would respond to something, is the day it’s time to quit. But I don’t know that. Myxomatosis is a really good example of that. I didn’t expect them to wanna get into that track at all. And when we got together after they had some demos and stuff, that was the one that everybody said first ‘we gotta do that somehow, because that’s amazing’, and I was like ‘wow, really ?’ I was really surprised and really excited, cause it’s like, I expected them to wanna go near the song ones first, you know, and they didn’t. I don’t know where it is, but there’s certain points in that song where the drums keep flippin’ and stuff that… I think it’s some of the most exciting stuff we’ve ever done, really. »[/quote]

Le groupe retourne en studio pour répéter les chansons qu’ils veulent jouer pendant l’été. Myxomatosis est la première chanson sur laquelle ils travaillent.

La chanson est jouée pour la première fois à Lisbonne. On l’entendra 8 fois pendant cette tournée ibérique de 2002, comme ici à San Sebastian le 30 juillet :

A la fin de cette première version, des paroles qu’on ne retrouvera plus ensuite :
[quote ]

the mongrel cat came home
holding half a head
proceeded to show it off
to all his new found friendshe said I been where I liked
I slept with who I liked
she ate me up for breakfast
she held me in a vice

but now I don’t know why I feel so tongue-tied

I sat in the cupboard
and wrote it down in neat
they were cheering and waving, cheering and waving
twitching and salivating like with myxomatosis

but it got edited, fucked up
strangled, beaten up
used as a photo in Time magazine
buried in a burning black hole in Devon

I don’t know why I feel so tongue-tied
don’t know why I feel so skinned alive

my thoughts are misguided and a little naive
I twitch and I salivate like with myxomatosis
you should put me in a home or you should put me down
I got myxomatosis, I got myxomatosis

yeah, no one likes a smart ass, but we all like stars
but that wasn’t my intention, I did it for a reason
it must have got fucked up, strangled, beaten up
I got myxomatosis, I got myxomatosis

yeah, we boiled up the head
we dug into the meat
he shook hands with the cripples and he gave them all milk
he did a few card tricks for his mafia geeks, but now

I don’t know why I feel so tongue-tied[/quote]

Le groupe a ré-arrangé la chanson pour les 3 derniers concerts de la tournée (le 1/08 à San Sebastien, le 05 et le 06/08 à Salamanque).

Vidéo du 1/08 :

La version est raccourcie (quelques lignes disparaissent à la fin).

Fort de son premier travail en studio, et de l’expérimentation en live, le groupe retrouve le studio à Los Angeles en septembre. Ils font alors quelques tentatives d’enregistrement, pour Myxomatosis avec le deuxième arrangement live, mais s’amusent aussi beaucoup, comme le raconte Thom dans cette interview pour XFM :

http://www.xfm.co.uk/article.asp?id=3561
[quote ]“Thom : We weren’t in the studio all the time. We did a track a day, but we went out to glamorous parties too, so we got a bit of the life.”[/quote]
Toutefois, ils ont bien conscience qu’avec le nouvel arrangement des 3 derniers lives, ils tenaient le bon bout :

Thom, Third Way Magazine, 3 octobre 2004 :
[quote ]Thom : « And then a song like ’Myxomatosis’ – when we did it in the studio, we kind of liked the sound of it but it really frustrated us, because we didn’t really understand where it was going. And then we played it live and the last three or four times we got this absolutely amazing reaction. It was like a train crash, you know ? »[/quote]

Fin 2002-début 2003, le groupe est de retour en studio, mais cette fois en Angleterre, dans l’Oxfordshire, pour une ultime session de travail. L’ambiance est un peu plus studieuse,

Ed explique comment ça se passer dans le CD d’Interview officiel d’HTTT :
[quote ]And we wanted to incorporate the live thing. And the Tubeway Army thing was the perfect thing to do. But again, we had to find an approach to it, and we didn’t quite get it in L.A., but we eventually got to loop Phil’s drums, and then we did a sort of a live rough in the control room. And then other stuff was added. It’s that totally playing something in the spirit of how you think they might have made records in ’79, ’80, or whatever.”[/quote]
Voici un des tubes des Tubeway Army, ce groupe dont Radiohead s’est inspiré pour Myxomatosis :

Jonny explique la même chose dans cette interview :
[quote ]Jonny : « That’s all playing around a lot with the idea of how keyboards used to be, they used to sound frightening, and Tubeway Army style, I suppose, or slightly out of tune. You forget that presumably in the 80s when keyboards were being recorded people would be playing them. And even if a band just had keyboards in it, they’d have to one at a time play keyboards onto tape, which is a really alien concept, because of computers and sequencing and how music is made today. So, that was done like that, pretty much. »[/quote]
Car ce qui comptait c’était bien l’esprit que donne le clavier…
[quote ]Jonny : « And it was one of those occasions where you’re recording, and the element you think is the key to the song, the rhythm, actually isn’t, and it’s in the detail. It’s just in the single keyboard lines. And as soon as they became overpowering and took over the song, the song started working. And the rhythm was just a way to lead you through the song, but it wasn’t the feature anymore. And suddenly it had this atmosphere attached to it, which is why it works, why it’s on the record, really. »[/quote]
Dans KCRW Morning Becomes Eclectic, Thom a expliqué en juin 2003 que la programmation de la chanson n’a pas été facile :
[quote ]« When we got into programming, or spending like two or three days working on sounds before they went down, or whatever, towards the end it wasn’t such a big deal. Because everybody now understood the necessary boring bits in the recording, you know what I mean ? And it was sort of alright. [to Phil] Remember ’Myxomatosis’, when I’d spend more or less 24 hours straight cutting up what you’d done on the drums. And like… the only way to have got it done was just like ’ok, leave me alone and I’ll try and do it’. And it worked, it was worth doing. But that wouldn’t have happened before, when we were doing Kid A and Amnesiac, because it was an insecurity thing. People were like ’well, why are we spending two days doing this ? Why are we spending two days cutting up drums or programming this bit here or this bit there. Bla bla bla. And now it’s like ’yeah, whatever, fine. If that’s what we need to do, let’s do it’. »[/quote]

Alors que le Cd ne doit sortir que dans quelques mois, des versions des chansons sortent d’on ne sait où. On se rendra compte en mai qu’il ne s’agit pas des version définitives, mais de la chanson dans l’état du mixage de février-mars.

Voici la version provisoire de Myxomatosis, proposée par le site citizeninsane :

La chanson sort sur l’album « Hail to the thief » avec « Judge, Jury & Executioner » comme titre alternatif.

Sortie en Europe du single « 2+2=5 », où l’on trouve le remix de Christian Vogel.

Sortie de l’EP « Com Lag » où figure le remix de la chanson par Christian Vogel.

La chanson a été choisie pour figurer sur la bande son du jeu FIFA 2004…

La chanson est jouée pour la première fois avec ce nouvel arrangement.

Elle le sera ainsi pendant toute la suite de la tournée, comme ici à Londres le 25 juin :