The single that marked Radiohead's return after over two years of no new material. It shook up the entire industry, a six-and-a-half minute epic schizophrenically switching between different styles and tunes. According to Thom it's about the fall of the Roman Empire. The band refused to make a radio edit of it, yet it still achieved a lot of airplay, and it peaked at number 3 in the UK charts - Radiohead's biggest hit to date.

Possibly one of the most famous Radiohead songs to date, Paranoid Android was the first single released from OK Computer. It's over 6 minutes long, and can honestly be described as an epic. It's like 3 great songs rolled into one. And each small section is genius. You'd have to hear it to know, but this track sums up the feeling of the entire album pretty well.

Paranoid Android was a complicated affair, not least because of the three disparate yet cohesive sections. It had been inspired by a bad experience Thom had one night in a Los Angeles bar. He had gone there for a quiet drink, but found himself surrounded by parasitic groupie types and pretentious California posers. Unbeknown to him, virtually everyone in the room, except himself, was on cocaine. Thom: "The people I saw that night were just like demons from another planet. Everyone was trying to get something out of me. I felt like my own self was collapsing in the presence of it, but I also felt completely, utterly part of it, like it was all going to some crashing down any minute." The band had been playing the song for months in rehearsals, but that night, while he couldn't sleep, the lyrics flooded into Thom's head at 5am. Of particular horror to him was one especially vicious lady who had a drink spilt over her dress and whose face contorted in venom at the culprit - she was the 'kicking, squealing Gucci little piggy' that Thom sang of and he was horrified. Thom: "Basically it's just about chaos, chaos, utter fucking chaos."

After being asked if the song was about the Fall of the Roman Empire, Thom adopted his explanation, but other band members have likened the lyrics of the track to those of The Bends. On one level the lyrics are absurd; on another, they're quite serious. During the band's 1996 live sets, when they were opening for Alanis Morissette, the song was without the guitar solo ending and instead ended with a very long hammond solo courtesy of Jonny, drawing it out to the eleven-minute mark. Apparently the band begged him not to play it, and it reduced many of Alanis Morisette's audiences to screaming point.

It may have been named after the character 'Marvin' from the Hitch Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy books. Marvin was known as 'the paranoid android'.

The 'kicking squealing Gucci little piggy' was based on an incident that Thom witnessed in a very posh LA bar where a woman with a white Gucci dress had red wine accidentally spilled down it. "Her look was pure evil".

The chanting part of the song underneath 'rain down...' was actually made by reversing Thom saying "monk".

Some notes from the official Radiohead Website:

"In a bar in hollywood* the centre of the western universe, standing at the bar (social drinking) after doing the talk show bit. do you want to know this? this is what we aspire to is it? it is dark, there is a woman opposite me who is as sociably anorexic as her poodle, she looks desolate in her make up and lost eyes, next to her her husband boyfriend is persuading a younger fleshed half his age stewardess to come back to the hills to their mansion to sample his wine. she looks at him like he's a character in a hammer house horror. one of our friends spills a glass of wine over a vacuum packed gucci outfit complete with matching white hand bag. the witch goes crazy, we think it is fuunny. until we see the evil in her eyes. my friend is asked to leave. the gucci creature is the closest thing i have seen to the devil. the woman is possessed. i cannot sleep that night asking what we've got our selves into. voices talking like fax machines, hissing and spitting like demons, this is the master race. and now im part of it. anyway you didnt want to know that."