Radiohead‘s “Karma Police” started as a joke. Jonny Greenwood told Melody Maker in 1997 that the title was a band catchphrase on tour, trotted out whenever somebody in the Radiohead camp behaved badly: “the karma police will catch him sooner or later.” Thom Yorke called it “a song against bosses,” dedicated to anyone working for a big firm, and he spent most of 1997 telling interviewers not to take it too seriously.
Radiohead debuted the song live in 1996 and released it on August 25, 1997, as the second single from “OK Computer”. It reached Number 8 in the UK and Number 14 on Billboard’s Modern Rock Tracks chart in the States. It’s also one of the few “OK Computer” songs that survives being reduced to one instrument. Jonny Greenwood played the piano part on the record, with Yorke on acoustic guitar, per MusicRadar’s breakdown of the session.
A Closer Look At The Score for “Karma Police”
The score lists the key as G major and E minor. Treat that as notational bookkeeping rather than a verdict. The verse orbits A minor, the chorus behaves like G major, and the coda lands somewhere else entirely. The one-sharp signature is just the tidiest way to spell all three. The verse runs on an eight-bar loop that opens with A minor moving to D/F#. If slash chords are new to you, the letter after the slash is the bass note, so D/F# means a D major chord with an F sharp on the bottom. That bass note lets the left hand step between chords instead of leaping. You’ll see the device constantly in this arrangement.
Two bars later, the same melodic phrase returns, but the harmony swaps the D/F# for an F major chord, putting an F natural where the F sharp was. The change makes the second pass sag. Yorke’s vocal melody never touches either note, so the band can flip between them underneath without anything clashing.
One altered note can destabilize a whole progression as long as the melody stays out of its way. You don’t need extended chords. Listeners have pointed at The Beatles‘ “Sexy Sadie” for decades as the model for this verse, and the resemblance is real, at least through the verse, though the band never formally confirmed it. Both songs slouch around the piano at the same weary pace.
The F#7 Chord in the ‘Karma Police’ Chorus
The chorus opens with the most ordinary progression in pop: C, D, G. In G major, that’s IV, V, I, the same move behind a thousand campfire songs. Then, right after “this is what you’ll get,” an F#7 chord lands. It belongs to none of the song’s keys. In the score, you can spot it by the A sharp in the chord.
F#7 is the dominant of B minor, and B minor is where the song eventually goes. The entire “for a minute there, I lost myself” coda abandons the verse’s A minor orbit and settles into B minor. The chorus is setting up a move, the song doesn’t make for another three minutes.
Yorke knew the song was split in half. “This is really schizophrenic, isn’t it?” he told Select in 1997, referring to the personality change at the midpoint. The arrangement tracks that change with dynamics. The verses sit around mezzo-forte with dips to piano. The coda arrives at forte around measure 55, and by measure 66, you’re at fortissimo with crescendo markings still pushing.
Practical Notes for Playing ‘Karma Police’ at Tempo
The tempo marking says “Moderately slow Rock Ballad” at 70 beats per minute. Every pianist who learns this song ends up playing it too fast within a week, mostly because at 70, the left hand feels exposed. A few practical notes for anyone opening this arrangement. The first systems put both hands in the bass clef, because the arranger kept the melody in the register Yorke actually sings it, so don’t panic when the right hand starts below middle C. The F naturals and the lone A sharp are the borrowed harmony described above, showing up in notation, not engraving errors. And since so much of the song is that same eight-bar verse loop, learning the first page honestly gets you more than half of the way through.
On the record, the song ends with Ed O’Brien overloading an AMS digital delay unit until everything dissolves into feedback. Yorke said, in quotes compiled by MusicRadar, the band’s direction to O’Brien was to put down his headphones and just go, and they taped a few passes of the result. None of that translates to a piano, so the arrangement substitutes a ritardando in the final two bars and fermatas over the closing chord.
