Story of the song: Karma Police by Radiohead

OK Computer, Radiohead’s epic third album, has little to do with PCs. “It was just a noise that was going on in my head for most of the year,” said the band’s frontman, Thom Yorke. Track six, the faux satirical “Karma Police”, was inspired by Yorke’s dislike of being sneered at. “I can’t handle having people looking at me in that certain way,” he said. “That’s what ‘Karma Police’ and a lot of the album is about.”

With a plummeting chord progression, resembling The Beatles’ “Sexy Sadie”, and some deftly humorous lyrics, this is an atypical off-the-shoulder number from the usually buttoned-up Oxford five-piece. It was premiered live when Radiohead supported Alanis Morissette on her Can’t Not tour in the summer of 1996 and was recorded in September of that year at a Bath manor house, owned by the actress Jane Seymour.

The OK Computer track “Exit Music (For a Film)” was taped in the stone entrance hall. The eerie siren closing “Karma Police” was created by the band’s second guitarist, Ed O’Brien, by feeding sound through a digital delay machine. “He made weird noises, and we taped that a few times,” Yorke said.

On release as the second single from the album, “Karma Police” proceeded in a northerly direction up the charts. The accompanying video, more disturbing than the song itself, showed Yorke pursued by a petrol-leaking car which he ends up torching. Unpicking the metaphors and meanings embedded in the song’s brief lyrics and accompanying imagery might keep the chatrooms busy, but Yorke has made it quite clear: “It’s for someone who has to work for a large company. This is a song against bosses. F*** the middle management!”