Clocks

Martin wrote the riff late one night in the Liverpool studio when A Rush of Blood to the Head was close to done. He said Muse had inspired it. Buckland picked up his guitar and played chords over it, which Martin likened to a chemical reaction. The band thought it too late for the album and filed a demo on a CD marked Songs for #3, meant for the next record. After headlining Glastonbury in 2002, they returned to it when Phil Harvey told them to work on it at once, since its lyric was about urgency. Harvey also came up with the outro and whistled the melody to Buckland. The album's release was put back by two months so the song could be finished, and the band recorded it quickly.

In the US it was the second single, released on 11 November 2002, because the label felt The Scientist would not give American listeners enough of a blood rush. In the UK it came out as the third single in March 2003 and reached number nine. In the US it reached 29. It won Record of the Year at the 2004 Grammys, and Rolling Stone placed it at 490 on its 2010 list of the 500 greatest songs. Petridis said it ran U2's big rock approach through a more opaque lens. The piano riff has been widely sampled, including in Jordin Sparks and Chris Brown's No Air, and Röyksopp's remix reached number five in the 2003 Triple J Hottest 100.