"The Daily Mail" was written six years before release. When Radiohead decided to perform it for From the Basement, they completed the arrangement within a week, featuring a brass section arranged by guitarist Jonny Greenwood.[4] The song attacks the Daily Mail, a British tabloid newspaper, with lyrics such as "the lunatics have taken over the asylum" and "we'll feed you to the hounds / to the Daily Mail".[5]Vulture described it as a "piano ballad that grows, bolstered by fury ... into a swaggering anthem".[6]
"Staircase" features "atmospheric" synthesisers and "busy, skittering" beats.[7] Radiohead worked on it before their eighth album, The King of Limbs (2011), but it did not progress beyond the demo stages until after the album's release.[8]
Reception[]
Reviewing a performance on The Colbert Report, Guardian writer Hadley Freeman wrote that "The Daily Mail" was "a funny idea" but "barely touches its nigh-on unmissable target".[9] However, a 2020 Guardian article by Jazz Monroe named it the 39th best Radiohead song: "It’s irresistible, suggesting an unlikely kinship between Radiohead and the venerable pop cynic Randy Newman: musical-theatre flair weaponised against tabloid hysteria."[10]
