07 fitter happier

Fitter
Happier
More productive
Comfortable
Not drinking too much
Regular exercise at the gym (3 days a week)
Getting on better with your associate employee contemporaries
At ease
Eating well (no more microwave dinners and saturated fats)
A patient better driver
A safer car (baby smiling in back seat)
Sleeping well (no bad dreams)
No paranoia
Careful to all animals (never washing spiders down the plughole)
Keep in contact with old friends (enjoy a drink now and then)
Will frequently check credit at (moral) bank (hole in wall)
Favors for favors
Fond but not in love
Charity standing orders
On sundays ring road supermarket
(No killing moths or putting boiling water on the ants)
Car wash (also on sundays)
No longer afraid of the dark
Or midday shadows
Nothing so ridiculously teenage and desperate
Nothing so childish
At a better pace
Slower and more calculated
No chance of escape
Now self-employed
Concerned (but powerless)
An empowered and informed member of society (pragmatism not idealism)
Will not cry in public
Less hance of illness
Tires that grip in the wet (shot of baby strapped in back seat)
A good memory
Still cries at a good film
Still kisses with saliva
No longer empty and frantic
Like a cat
Tied to a stick
That's driven into frozen winter shit (the ability to laugh at weakness)
Calm
Fitter, healthier and more productive
A pig
In a cage
On antibiotics

FITTER HAPPIER (1:57)
available on: ok computer

I was having real trouble writing anything. But I was walking around a lot, endlessly walking around each day. One particularly bad day I wrote this list. I set down items like a shopping list, and it turned into this thing. I showed the words to everybody, and everyone thought it was really good.

--Thom Yorke (Exit Music: The Radiohead Story by Mac Randall)

Q: "The artwork on the LP and some of the T-shirts on sale - they seem, to have quite a coherent set of concerns, ones that stem from 'Fitter Happier'. Was that an accident?"

Thom: "We actively chose to pursue the 'Fitter Happier' thing. The one that says 'Meeting People Is Easy', I like a lot. In that picture [the only bit of artwork reproduced on the CD itself], one guy's got a briefcase, one guy hasn't. Someone's being sold something they don't really want, and someone's being friendly because they're trying to sell something. That's what it means to me. It's quite sad, and quite funny as well."

Q: "It often seems that you're puzzling over a society in which people need outside advice about very primal things - how to remain healthy, how to interact with each other..."

All the artwork and so on... we chose to pursue it after we did the track. More relevant is the reason I wrote the words in the first place. [pause] These were things I was being told to do. I showed it to the others and they liked it, and then Stanley - who does the artwork - was playing around on the computer and made it say it.
After that, it went from being a list of things that had a lot of emotional meaning for me and that was it, to coming to life. In fact, it was all the things that I hadn't said in the songs. Stanley was really just pushing into it, and I was as well in the end. It was like, 'I'm not going to hide this thing that I wrote, 'cause I'm really proud of it.

--Thom, Select (December 1997)

notes: Jonny Greenwood: "this was the original text which we already put on our internet-site a year ago. We put all kinds of things on it. Things we like, things which we don't know what to do with it them. One day, Thom was playing with his new computer and he found out he could let the machine talk. When he programmed the text from Fitter, Happier, it sounded very beautiful on a sort of alarming tone. It was something weird. It wasn't melodramatic, but it wasn't cold either. The music is a combination of a piano through a memo-recorder and a 24 headed string-orchestra, who played something i wrote two days before."

Thom Yorke: "the most escapist moment of OK Computer is in Fitter Happier. We put the lyrics in the computer with a talk-program. Just standard software. The text is now spoken by an emotionless computervoice. I see it as the ultimate dissociation with the lyrics and your responsibilty for it. See it as something between a statement and an experiment."

Thom (again):"I'm not standing behind the lyrics anymore. Sometimes your ideas get entangled with other ideas, and then you have to apologize for the original idea because it doesn't make sense anymore.That's what happened with 'Fitter Happier'. Now, I listen to the piano part."
(http://ateaseweb.com/songs/fitterhappier.php)
fitter, happier more productive

* comfortable
* not drinking too much
* regular exercise at the gym (3days a week)
* getting on better with your associate employee contemporaries
* at ease
* eating well (no more microwave dinners and saturated fats)
* a patient better driver
* a safer car (baby smiling in back seat)
* sleeping well (no bad dreams)
* no paranoia
* careful to all animals (never washing spiders down the plughole)
* keep in contact with old friends (enjoy a drink now and then)
* will frequently check credit at (moral) bank (hole in wall)
* favours for favours
* fond but not in love (girlfriends and wives)
* charity stanbding orders
* on sundays ring road supermarket
* (no killing moths or putting boiling water on the ants)
* car wash (also on sundays)
* no longer afraid of the dark
* or midday shadows
* nothing so ridiculoiusly teenage and desperate
* nothing so childish
* at a better pace
* slower and more calculated
* no chance of escape
* now self-employed (his own man is_)
* concerned (but powerless)
* an empowered & informed member of society (pragmatism not idealism)
* will not cry in public
* girlfriends and wives
* less chance of illness
* tyres that grip in the wet (shot of baby strapped in back seat)
* clean shaven
* a good memory
* still cries at a good film
* still kisses with saliva
* no longer empty and frantic
* like a cat
* tied to a stick
* that's driven into
* frozen winter shit (the ability to laugh at weakness)
* calm
* fitter, healthier and more productive
* a pig
* in a cage
* on antibiotics
(http://www.radiohead.com/Archive/Site1/oes1.html)