The fact that Street Spirit is their purest song, but Thom didn’t write it. It wrote itself. Radiohead were just its messengers; its biological catalysts. Its core is a complete mystery to Thom, and, you know, he wouldn’t ever try to write something that hopeless. All of their saddest songs have somewhere in them at least a glimmer of resolve. Street Spirit has no resolve. It is the dark tunnel without the light at the end. It represents all tragic emotion that is so hurtful that the sound of that melody is its only definition. Everyone in the band has a way of dealing with that song. It’s called detachment. Especially Thom; he detaches his emotional radar from that song, or he couldn’t play it. He’d crack. He’d break down on stage. That’s why its lyrics are just a bunch of mini-stories or visual images as opposed to a cohesive explanation of its meaning. He used images set to the music that he thought would convey the emotional entirety of the lyric and music working together. That’s what’s meant by ‘all these things you’ll one day swallow whole’. He meant the emotional entirety, because he didn’t have it in him to articulate the emotion. He’d crack… Us fans are braver than him to let that song penetrate us, or maybe we don’t realise what we’re listening to. We don’t realise that Street Spirit is about staring the fucking devil right in the eyes, and knowing, no matter what the hell you do, he’ll get the last laugh. And it’s real, and true. The devil really will get the last laugh in all cases without exception, and if Thom let himself think about that too long, he’d crack. He can’t believe Radiohead has fans that can deal emotionally with that song. That’s why he’s convinced that we don’t know what it’s about. It’s why the band plays it towards the end of their sets. It drains Thom, and it shakes him, and hurts like hell every time he plays it, looking out at thousands of people cheering and smiling, oblivious to the tragedy of its meaning, like when you’re going to have your dog put down and it’s wagging its tail on the way there. That’s what we all look like, and it breaks his heart. He wishes that song hadn’t picked them as its catalysts, and so he doesn’t claim it. It asks too much. He didn’t write that song.