![\"Thom](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/Thom-Yorke-Radiohead-2025-Far-Out-Magazine-1140x855.jpg\")
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Credit: Raph Pour-Hashemi<\/p>\n
Thu 28 May 2026 12:00, UK <\/p>\n
When Thom Yorke<\/a> writes lyrics, he never has a story in mind \u2013 while other musicians, like aggro-rock king Jack White or rock opera visionary Pete Townshend, might want a story with a start, middle, and end, Yorke has always favoured abstract non-sequiturs and fragmented, disjointed ideas. Radiohead\u2019s sound thrives amid such semantic ambiguity.<\/p>\n In this way, the British singer-songwriter has always favoured metaphor over literal interpretation, and this is most evident on the unsettling, hypnotic 2000 track, \u2018Everything In Its Right Place\u2019<\/a>, which suggests, contrary to the deterministic title, that things aren\u2019t as they seem.<\/p>\n After repeating the album title, Kid A, as well as the track\u2019s title, Yorke offers one of three statements that make up the song \u2013 \u201cYesterday, I woke up sucking on a lemon\u201d \u2013 in an interview with Rolling Stone<\/a> in 2001, he recalled, \u201cLots of people say that song is gibberish\u2026 It\u2019s not.\u201d<\/p>\n Though British people would be familiar with the strange citrus symbolism, Yorke clarified the saying to be on the safe side: \u201cIn England, \u2018sucking a lemon\u2019 refers to the face you pull because a lemon is so tart. That\u2019s the face I had for three years,\u201d he revealed.<\/p>\n Audiences overseas were quick to paint the phrase as a nonsensical embodiment of his lack of creative clarity, but Yorke had put the phrase there for a reason, as he was inspired by the bleakness he felt during the OK Computer tour<\/a>, frustrated and alienated despite getting everything he thought he wanted \u2013 however, including the line originally took some encouragement from producer Nigel Godrich, who was alone with Yorke when they were working on the beloved tune.<\/p>\n Speaking to Interview Magazine<\/a>, Godrich reminisced, \u201cThom always used to just carry notebooks with him everywhere we went. We\u2019d be eating, and he writes stuff down all the time. For \u2018Everything In Its Right Place\u2019, it was just me and him in a room, and he\u2019s like, \u2018Yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon\u2026 Oh, I can\u2019t say that.\u2019 And I\u2019m like, \u2018Yes, you can. That\u2019s great.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n At this time of writing, Yorke would pull on the techniques of Dadaism<\/a>, the radical anti-art movement driven by the disgust of the horrors of World War I, where aesthetics were pushed towards an arena of absurdity and chance.<\/p>\n Further reading: From The Vault<\/p>\n Therefore, if critics were tarnishing the lyrics with the \u201cgibberish\u201d label, they weren\u2019t actually far from the truth \u2013 rather, they\u2019d imbued that comment with a derogatory tone, whereas Yorke, like his nonsense predecessors before him, wanted to expand, explode, and interrogate the literal act of making meaning by stringing words together to form sense.<\/p>\n At a time when the world wasn\u2019t making much sense to Yorke, where he might as well have been dining on alienation and disillusionment for breakfast, a surface-level obscurity or tension in understanding perfectly replicates his struggle. <\/p>\n Beyond the 2000 hit, this approach is all over Kid A. On \u2018In Limbo\u2019, Yorke repeats the line \u201cYou\u2019re living in a fantasy world<\/a>\u201c. This is a view he spins upon himself, time and time again. The joke is on us if we can\u2019t figure that one out.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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