The story of Treefingers

Bratislava, the late 1990s. The modem screeched, the line was slow, and I was a teenager who had just discovered that web pages were made of something you could read. I taught myself to build them the way everyone did back then, by hitting View Source on other people’s sites and reading until it made sense.

Radiohead were already there by then. A few years earlier my sister had come home from France with a copy of Pablo Honey, and I played it until I knew every second of it. I hunted down everything that followed, and by the time OK Computer had sunk in they were the band I measured everything else against. So when I finally finished a website, of course it was about them.

radiohead.sk was a small Slovak page, coded by hand and updated whenever I heard something. I expected nobody to read it. People came anyway, for the news or a lyric or a tape of a show somebody had recorded, and they stayed to talk. For a few years it was the corner of the web where Slovak fans found each other, and it felt alive.

In 2003 I built an English version and called it Treefingers, after the ambient fifth track on Kid A. It soon outgrew the Slovak original. Friends joined in to write the updates and to argue at length about which record was best, and for a few good years Treefingers was one of the places people turned to for Radiohead news.

Then I moved to the other side of the world, and kept the site going from there for another couple of years. After that it went quiet, slowly, and stayed quiet for a long time.

It came back in 2026, for no particular reason. The old files were still there, and one evening I opened them again and could not quite leave them alone.

It is here for the band, and for the people who made good memories out of reading pages like this one and talking to each other about music that mattered. It is also a thank you to everyone who helped back then, and to everyone whose work became part of it, the words and the photographs most of all.

These days I live with my family in Wellington, NZ. If you were here back then, welcome back. If you are new, come in and stay a while.

webmaster Miro Bzduch · 2026