A photo of Thom with his Taylor electro-acoustic classical guitar during Wall of Eyes at the BBC 6 Music Festival on March 9, 2024 (Mike Gray).
Yesterday, the Smile releasedBodies Laughing, the latest digital single from their new album Cutouts. The track (or at least the name) has been bouncing around for over a decade, even appearing on a couple of chalkboard lists of in-progress songs during early sessions for In Rainbows. In an interview with fan-site CitizenInsane from around that time, Ed revealed that the song was “a sort of Brazilian bossa nova kind of thing”, but Radiohead “never really got it together.” It ultimately wasn’t performed until the Smile debuted it during their concert at Berlin’s Tempodrom on May 20, 2022. (The aforementioned CitizenInsane interview took place at Berlin’s Hotel de Rome, less than ten minutes away from the Tempodrom by car — doubtless just a coincidence, but fun to notice).
The Smile’s initial live version of the track was similar in structure to the final version, but the feel was much rockier: propelled by Jonny’s bass guitar riffs and Thom’s psychedelic strums on his EOB Sustainer guitar through an EQD Grand Orbiter phaser effect, building to a climax with feedbacking Sustainer solos in place of the synth interludes on the studio version. The Smile played that arrangement nearly forty times across 2022, but dropped it for 2023. In 2024, the song re-appeared with a new, surprisingly mellow arrangement, which we now know to be based on the Cutouts recording from 2023!
A photo from the Smile’s recording sessions at Abbey Road Studio 2 in March, 2023. Notice the prominant placement of the Prophet 5 REV2 on the bottom left.
Note: if you’re a fan of that kind of timestamped analysis, check out our articles page for a few others we’ve done over the years.
Intro (0:00)
- 0:00 The track starts with a quick synthy pitch bend, a trick that Radiohead used in the past for The National Anthem and These Are My Twisted Words. We then hear a few layers of a gentle synth. The synth has a sound close to a droning sine wave, with no modulation or vibrato. During the intro, the synth fades in and out with the notes E, A, B, D, and E (an octave above), with most layered centered but a couple slightly panned. More details on the exact synth below, for now we’ll just call it the “gentle synth”.
- 0:14 Thom enters with a nylon-string guitar, doubtless the same one used for the song Wall of Eyes. The guitar is recorded twice, with one take panned hard left and another panned hard right.
- 0:18 Jonny enters with a clean electric bass guitar.
Verse 1 (0:37)
- 0:38 Thom’s voice enters. There’s a rich reverb applied to his voice, but it’s mixed relatively quiet so the words are still clear.
- 0:40 The gentle synths exit.
Verse 2 (0:55)
- 1:04 Gentle synths re-enter, this time swelling in and out more gradually.
Verse 3 (1:13)
- 1:18 Jonny’s ondes Martenot enters. It’s initially panned hard right, but pans around as Jonny slides around. It may be subtly layered with the gentle synth at other points in the song as well, but this is the place where its timbre becomes distinct.
- 1:22-1:26 Thom adds a brief backing vocal for the line “and everybody’s laughing”, panned hard left.
Break (1:32)
- 1:32 A reed keyboard (either a reed organ or harmonium) enters, panned right. It appears to be layered with the gentle synth: one can hear the distinctive attack and imperfection of an acoustic reed instrument, but I also hear the droning triangle waves of the gentle synth from the intro.
Verse 4 (1:39)
- 1:39 A clean electric guitar with heavy reverb enters, panned left. It’s easy to imagine that this was Jonny experimenting with the added reverb options on his Boss RE-202 Space Echo, which had replaced his RE-20 only a few months before the recording sessions. But it’s equally easy to imagine it’s just the reverb on his Fender Super Reverb amplifier.
- 1:42 Tom enters on drums. After a quick fill on snare and a tap on the left-panned ride cymbal, he plays a pattern on kick, snare, and hihat.
- 1:55 At this point, the right-panned gentle synth becomes a little more prominent than the reed keyboard.
- 1:57 Electric guitar exits.
Verse 5 (1:58)
- 1:58 So far, Jonny has played a more supportive role on bass, occasionally throwing in hints of a riff. Here, he finally gives us the full riff: it starts with a minor chord outline, followed by a nice syncopated outline of the minor seventh chord a fifth above the initial chord.
- 1:59-2:08 Thom’s left-panned backing vocal re-enters for another couple lines: “you’re falling on your ass” and “and everybody’s laughing”.
Chorus 1 (2:16)
- 2:16 Thom’s strumming pattern and Tom’s drum pattern remain similar to the verses in this section, but Jonny switches to a slightly simpler riff outlining.
- 2:16-2:30 Thom adds layered and panned backing vocals, singing a low wordless, counter-melody.
- 2:16-2:32 A synthesizer enters, panned hard left. This synth has a particularly strong Prophet 5 character: a distinctive type of thinness that comes with increased filter resonance. But it also has its oscillators tuned an octave apart for a more organ-like sound. And it’s set with almost-too-much pitch modulation, in contrast to the droning gentle synth. It plays a pattern based around a D minor scale.
- 2:16-2:32 The reed keyboard, still panned hard right, plays a counter melody to the Prophet. It sustains an A, then descends stepwise to an E. At the same time, the gentle synth sustains an A.
Bridge (2:38)
- 2:38 Tom’s drums exit with a final hit on a right-panned cymbal. Thom’s nylon guitars similarly exit with a strummed chord that rings out.
- 2:38-2:53 A right-panned Prophet plays an ascending motif marked by augmented seconds, bringing us from the initial D minor key area to an E minor key area. A left-panned Prophet plays a descending motif of a semitone followed by a third. The bass plays a similar pattern to the descending synth. Note that the right-panned Prophet is not a reedy sound, but instead the same pitch-modulated organ-y patch as the left channel.
- 2:44 There’s also a clean, finger-picked electronic guitar panned slightly left during the modulation to E minor. The guitar is harder to identify than the synths and bass, but at this moment you can hear a distinctive slide that reveals it’s a guitar playing the extra notes, not a Rhodes piano or other similar instrument.
Verse 6 (2:53)
- 2:53 Thom’s nylon guitars re-enter, once again hard panned left and right.
- 2:56-3:00 There’s a quiet feedbacking pitch-shifter effect panned left for a few seconds (likely an EQD Rainbow Machine or Astral Destiny).
- 3:06-3:10 We hear a few strums on a dulcimer or zither, panned left.
- 3:11 A synth chord, panned left, reinforced the word “laughing”
- 3:15 The gentle synth returns with a sustained dyad, adding a slight swell into the next section.
- Note how all of the added layers during this verse have been panned left? You might think it makes the mix feel lob-sided, and it does. But that emptiness on the right adds suspense, making it feel much richer when several new layers enter on both sides in the follow section…
Chorus 2 (3:18)
- 3:18 Tom’s drums and Thom’s low backing vocals re-enter.
- 3:18 The organ-like Prophet re-enters with its D minor scale motif, panned hard-left. At the same time, the reed keyboard returns, panned hard-right, once more blending with a sustained “A” note from the gentle synth.
- 3:33 Thom’s backing vocals exit. It sounds like the reed keyboard blends with the gentle synth at the same time.
Break 2 / Synth Solo (3:40)
- 3:40 Two arpeggiated synth enter, panned left and right. The left synth is pretty dry and piercing, while the right has a lot of reverb. They initially play the same arpeggio, but diverge over the course of this section. This sounds like the work of the band’s vintage Prophet 600, which unlike the Prophet 5 has an on-board arpeggiator. That said, it’s possible that it’s just the Prophet 5 controlled by external MIDI, perhaps even by a Max patch (like the one used for Detuned Mechanical Piano on Jonny’s Power of the Dog soundtrack).
Verse 7 (3:55)
- 4:00 The arpeggiated synths fade out in a wash of reverb, replaced immediately by the reed keyboard.
- 4:06 Thom adds a high backing vocal panned right, while Jonny’s electric guitar re-enters panned left.
- 4:08 The reed organ switches to the A to E stepwise motif that it originally played during the choruses, but here it offers a counter-melody to Thom’s verse vocals.
Chorus 3 / Outro (4:20)
- 4:20 Thom’s low backing vocals re-enter, creating a more complex web with the newer backing layers. At the same time, the organ-like Prophet re-enters with the D minor scale motif, panned hard left.
- 4:32 We hear three more descending quiet strums on the dulcimer/zither, panned slightly to the right.
- 4:35 Thom’s high vocal drops out.
- 4:36 The left-panned organ-like Prophet plays a last D note and fades out over a few seconds.
- 4:49 The song ends with a kick, snare, and cymbal hit from Tom along with a D on the bass from Jonny. The way the song’s elements drop out to leave just an instrument and drums is reminiscent of songs from the King of Limbs-era, Staircase.
End (4:58)
Synthesizers and tape reels in Jonny’s Oxford studio, from during the recording of Wall of Eyes and Cutouts (the Smile). From left to right: a 1980s Sequential Prophet 600, a 2020s Prophet 5 REV4, and an Elektron Digitone Keys.
What’s the synth?
Most of the synthesizer tracks on the studio recording sound like the band’s Sequential Prophet 5 REV4. They first used the Prophet reissue for their first proper tour in mid-2022 (before that they’d played only a handful of shows). Ever since, the Prophet has been a staple on songs both old and new (particularly for Jonny). The synth also featured prominently in studio footage from the simultaneous recording of Wall of Eyes and Cutouts at Abbey Road Studio 2 in March 2023. One photo showed a host of synths resting (unplugged) on top of a piano (including Thom’s Moog Matriarch), while the Prophet was set up right at the center of the room. Of course, the band doubtless experimented with other synths. One photo from Jonny’s studio in Oxford showed an expansive eurorack modular setup, and another photo showed a 1980s Sequential Prophet 600 and an Elektron Digitone Keys alongside the Prophet 5. Still, the nostalgic pads on Foreign Spies certainly sound like a Prophet 5, and the same can be said for much of Bodies Laughing,
However, the “gentle synth” is harder to identify since it has so few overtones. The lack of overtones initially made the Elektron Digitone Keys seem a likely candidate. After all, FM synths can create additive sine and triangle sounds very easily if the actual FM modulation is set very low. However, if you turn up the volume on the recording, you can hear some colorful noise that fluctuates with the volume of the synth layers (listen at 0:11 in particular). This suggests an analogue synth. And indeed, the Prophet 5 can create extremely similar sounds if the triangle on oscillator B is solo’d and the cutoff and resonance are set just right. The noise helps to cover any of the quieter overtones left by the filter, giving a vibe closer to a sine tone.
The sliding synth that Jonny plays with his MIDI pedalboard during the newer live arrangement of Bodies Laughing sounds similar to both the “gentle synth” (described below) and his ondes Martenot. It seems likely that he created the synth patch specifically to perform the track live, since it sounds similar to but distinct from any of the synths on the studio recording itself. For the live patch, it sounds like Jonny tuned the oscillators on the Prophet 5 to a fourth, put the synth in unison mode, and turned up the glide control.
While Jonny replicates the gentle synth with his pedals on the new live arrangement, Robert Stillman replicates some of the Prophet synth lines on his Saxophone Bass Clarinet, adding the D minor scale motif during the choruses and a looped wall of sound in place of the arpeggiated Prophet solo.
Thom playing an unknown classical guitar during Present Tense at the Latitude Festival in 2009 — the first performance of the song! (tvoronina).
What’s the acoustic guitar?
At live shows since March 2024, Thom has brought Taylor 312ce-N: a single-cutaway electro-acoustic classical/nylon-string guitar. He played the Taylor not only for Wall of Eyes, but also for the new live arrangement of Bodies Laughing. We now know that arrangement was based on the band’s as-yet-unreleased Cutouts recording from 2023. However, it seems unlikely that Thom used the Taylor for the studio recording of either song. More likely, he used a more delicate classical guitar in the studio, and acquired the Taylor as a more convenient touring guitar. Perhaps Thom recorded the song with the classical that he used to play Black Swan and debut Present Tense at a solo show in 2009. Or perhaps it was the smaller classical that Thom used for a live-streamed performance of Reckoner for screenings of the environmental film Age of Stupid.
Jonny with his vintage Hofner bass during the band’s show in Dublin on March 7, 2024 (miguel_ruiz).
What’s the bass?
Similarly to Thom’s classical guitar, at live shows since March 2024, Jonny has played a red 1960s Hofner 182 bass guitar for both Wall of Eyes and Bodies Laughing. That instrument wasn’t visible in studio photos, so it’s possible that he played one of his Precision basses for the studio recording. The rich punch of the bass at ~0:48 in the track certainly has the vibe of a Precision bass. As an aside, the Hofner is a very unusual guitar because it’s finished in red tolex (the same material commonly used to cover amplifiers), rather than red paint. Photos of 182 basses on auction sites shows the “grain” of the tolex very clearly. I wonder if that makes it a little nicer to hug, compared to a normal guitar.