Main Index Pablo Honey The Bends OK Computer Kid A Amnesiac Hail to the Thief The Eraser In Rainbows The King of Limbs Amok Tomorrow's Modern Boxes A Moon Shaped Pool Anima Thom Yorke Jonny Greenwood Ed O'Brien Colin Greenwood Philip Selway
The musical basis for the song, 'Try To Save Your Prize', was included in the Radiohead.tv episodes in 2003:
An audio element, that can be heard in the final track, was used in one of the animations on theeraser.net:
An early draft of lyrics, titled 'Try To Save Your Prize', can be seen in a pdf file from theeraser.net, and contains several of the lines from the finished version:

Six lines from this early set of lyrics could be seen in the 'scrapbook' section of radiohead.com since 2004:






Thom: "In the last song, 'Cymbal Rush', the first bit you hear is something I had for three years, one little note. I could hear the melody in there straight away. But if you played it to anyone else without me singing it, you'd think, 'What's he on about?'"
Q: "Were these songs written in a concentrated period?"

Thom: "Absolutely, except for 'Cymbal Rush' - that riff that had been around for ages."
On arranging the songs for live performances:

Thom: "The two songs... 'Cymbal Rush' is all based around like... I mean, it's all done on laptops and it's all computerized. But there was enough of an essence to the song to get it across today. But it was a bit... It just took a while to work out as to how to do it."
Q: "Will you be playing any of these songs live?"

Thom: "The guys are talking about including some of the songs in the set. They seem well up for it. At the same time, we've got a lot of new songs of our own which we need to sort through first. I don't want to make it a big priority because it would be a lot of hard work to reinterpret stuff like that. It could become a major headache. But Jonny and I did a version of 'Cymbal Rush' - that's my favourite - at a benefit show recently [May 1st, at the Koko in London]. It came out quite messy, but we'd only had two days to rehearse it."
Thom: "The words to 'Cymbal Rush' started out coming from a direct experience. But then I filtered out all the' direct experience' connotations until I was left with something else entirely."
Hardly decipherable, this sheet also has some related lines:



Transcript
The words "your loved ones" appear in this one:

More lines can be found here:

And here:

The song was arranged quite differently for its few live performances. Thom and Jonny premiered 'Cymbal Rush' at a Friends Of The Earth benefit gig at the Koko in London with Thom playing piano and Jonny on Ondes Martenot:
This recording from late June 2006 comes from a KCRW broadcast:
In 2006 The Field remixed 'Cymbal Rush'. This version was released as a download in december 2007 before appearing on a series of three 12" vinyl remix EPs in january 2008. Later that year the Eraser remixes were also released on CD in Japan:
During the In Rainbows tour in 2008, 'Cymbal Rush' was one of three songs that Thom would play on his own at the piano to open the second (and sometimes the first) encore:
  In Rainbows tour june 2008 july 2008 august 2008 october 2008
Cymbal Rush [11] 15 24 06 08 08 13 25 28 02 04 08
Super Collider [4] 06 07 10 01
Fog [1] 02
It took Thom three years following the release of The Eraser to put together a proper tour based on the album. Recruiting Nigel Godrich, Flea, Mauro Refosco and Joey Waronker to form the band, the group played a first set of shows in october 2009 and another in april 2010, initially under the name "?????", since Thom had not yet named the project "Atoms For Peace". The tour ended with a solitary gig in august 2010 in Japan. Each night, the main set would consist of the The Eraser played in its entirety. During this period, Thom also played the song in Cambridge at a Green Party benefit and the 2010 Glastonbury and Big Chill festivals:
A new full band arrangement of this song was premiered on october 2nd 2009 at the Echoplex in Los Angeles at the first gig of Thom's then unnamed band, consisting of himself, Flea, Nigel Godrich, Joey Waronker and Mauro Refosco: