Music According to Benedict N°6: How To Disappear Completely
How To Disappear Completely by Radiohead is such a difficult song for me. I listened to it for the very first time after Benedict had mentioned his really surreal and heart wrenching history with the song it in this wonderful Two Paddocks article:
“The only reason for honing onto this track as opposed to any other in a back catalogue whose range defies belief is a personal one. It signifies how the best of times and the worst of times really do sidle up to one another. I first met your dear proprietor when filming a mini-series called To the Ends of The Earth for dear old Auntie (BBC) in South Africa which and I’d had the most amazing time on the job and a weekend learning to scuba dive with two other cast members — the best of times. Then the front right tyre blew on our car, we pulled in and were surrounded by men who came out of the bush and we were carjacked — the worst of times. A long (2.5 hours of ordeal) story but the intrinsic part for the song choice is that it was playing just before the tyre blew when I had lit a spiff and was contemplating how ridiculously blissfully happy I was. The next time I heard it was bundled against the windscreen of the car on the front passengers’ knees with my back and head hitting the windscreen as we were driven off road. My bum hit the car stereo and for a few surreal minutes Tom Yorke was sound tracking me to my death. I turned round as we bounced over the sand track, the headlights showing the passing sugar cane and kept thinking of the shallow graves they dug for themselves in the movie Casino as the master of introspection and modern ennui Mr T Yorke sang ‘I’m not here… This isn’t happening’ … We all lived.”
I can’t even imagine how this must have felt and how it must feel for Benedict to re-visit the song today. All I know is that How To Disappear Completely resonates deeply with me. It’s a song I often turn to when feeling desperately sad and am in need of a good cry. The feelings expressed in those lyrics sum up something I have felt a lot in the last few years after experiencing a very traumatic life changing event. This of course, says a lot about how universal music is and how it can speak to different people in completely different circumstance. I am glad about discovering this song through Benedict, even though listening to is cathartic rather than pleasant.
4 comments to “Music According to Benedict N°6: How To Disappear Completely”
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Just felt I had to comment on here officially – this song and the story that goes with it blew me away. I would have loved the song as a standalone track. But now I know it was the soundtrack to what must have been a terrifying experience, it makes it sound completely different….deeper. Final.
To know this was the song which went hand in hand with his experience, makes it more real, more tangible. Haunting.
It really does. I had never listened to the song before and it will always be linked to his story for me.
I haven’t heard this song either, and it’s so eerily accurately narrating his experience while he lives it. Incredibly haunting, unsettling, and so difficult to listen to.
[…] the soundtrack to his life (never more so than “How To Disappear Completely” – the song he heard before and during his carjacking while filming BBC’s “To The Ends of the […]