A big hit for McCartney, “Band On The Run” tells a lighthearted story about an incarcerated band who break out of jail. The name is vaguely based on a comment made by George Harrison regarding the current state of Apple Corps and the problems surrounding it.

A floaty, mesmerising track from Kid A that makes heavy use of dreamy imagery. Its themes are loneliness, being lost, confusion and water. It was originally titled “Lost at Sea”.

The theological meaning of limbo is that of a place outside hell and heaven to which unbaptized infants (or in this case, lost people) and the righteous who died before Christ’s coming were traditionally consigned.

The inspiration here derives from Dante’s Inferno (a book in which Thom’s then-partner, Rachel Owen, was a specialist on). Thom has stated in an interview for BBC1 in 2000:

I just got really into all the aspects of limbo, the levels of hell, and because that’s… It’s quite formative to the way that we all think about heaven and hell and so on, and this song was kicking around at the time and it sounded… Once we’d started recording, it sounded to me… Like some of the voice stuff on it, really just sounds like the voices from limbo, voices that can’t get out.

For Dante, the Limbo is the first circle of Hell, where he meets great Greek and Latin poets, philosophers and mathematicians, who are there because they were virtuous, but pagans.

It is not necessarily a bad place (Dante describes it as brightly lit and beautiful, but somber), but it is sort of a non-place, somewhere in between spaces. Like the places cited in the first barely recognizable words of the song.

Feeling in limbo, thus, can be a metaphor for writers block or something similar. Perhaps even the sensation of losing one’s sense of ego.

This song was written by John Lennon in India while they were studying Transcendental Meditation under Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. One of their friends, Prudence Farrow (Mia Farrow’s sister), became overzealous in her meditation and turned into a recluse. Lennon wrote this song as a message to snap her out of it. Said Lennon in a 1980 Playboy interview:

She was trying to find God quicker than anyone else. That was the competition in Maharishi’s camp: who was going to get cosmic first.

Prudence Farrow herself described the state she put herself into in a 2015 Rolling Stone interview:

I had been [meditating for] five days straight. I hadn’t gone to the bathroom, I hadn’t slept, and I hadn’t eaten… The older people on the course, they were sleeping; they were sunbathing on top of the roof; they would go for walks. I was one of many [who were] just maybe a little more extreme because I had no parental controls on me, so I could go all the way.
Right from the start, all I cared about was getting the job done, clearing out whatever darkness I had inside me, and becoming healthy and being able to live a real life. I knew meditation could do it for me — I didn’t understand how.

Prudence first heard the song through her mother – she had a copy of the White Album at her apartment and used her reaction to the song to win a game of “killer”. Prudence has since gone on to call the song “…very beautiful… very positive [and] an important song.”

The drums in this song (and “Back in the U.S.S.R”) are played by Paul McCartney, following Ringo Starr’s brief exit from the band during the White Album sessions.