100 favourite songs: #15: "Talk Show Host" - Radiohead

There’s something a bit unearthly about “Talk Show Host” — something about the song that’s not quite of this world, as if it’s been dialled in from some other place and arrived shot through with static and wind and interference, spectral dreams and thoughts all around, but at its centre an irregularly beating human heart and a pure lonely voice.

(Another way of putting it: while it’s the swirling, spacious instrumental/tone-bed which gives “Talk Show Host” its unique atmosphere, it’s Thom Yorke’s voice which truly compels one’s attention and drives the music directly into the listener’s spine.)

I’m pretty sure that this was the first Radiohead song I ever heard (another which came courtesy of the Romeo + Juliet soundtrack) and the desolately pretty, fragmentarily poetic jitter and shimmer of both music and words has haunted me ever since; even after all this time, I don’t feel at all as if I’ve grasped or understood the song — it’s always glimmering just out of reach like some horizon-dwelling sprite, hazy and ghostly and ever yearning.