On a Friday

the music room

Thom Yorke, Colin Greenwood, Ed O'Brien and Phil Selway were pupils at Abingdon School, outside Oxford, and named the band after the day they rehearsed in its music room. Selway dates the first time they played together to a 24-hour charity event in November 1985, and the song to “Dear Prudence”. Yorke's first words to his drummer, Mojo was told, were a request to play a bit faster. Colin's younger brother Jonny wanted in, and the only job going was harmonica.

It was always Colin's friends' band

jonny greenwood · mojo, april 2026

There is no On a Friday record, only tapes, and the earliest that survives is from 1986. It was made in the school music room, before Jonny had joined, with a schoolfriend, Raz, on saxophone. One side holds seven songs, among them “Fragile Friend”, “Girl (In the Purple Dress)” and “Lemming Trail”. The other has two of them again as dub remixes, the vocals dropping in and out, and a song called “In the Breeze”. “Lock the Door” is on it too, the song Yorke said in 2017 he had made on a four-track with Selway at a house near the school, and had never been able to find.

A copy went to a schoolmate when he was 17. His wife began putting the songs on YouTube in the autumn of 2011, and in September 2013 a cassette of the session sold at Omega Auctions in Stockport for £2,000, described as the only one known to survive.

gripe

Then they went to university: Yorke to Exeter, O'Brien to Manchester, Colin to Cambridge, Selway to Liverpool. On a Friday carried on in the holidays. Gripe was made at Woodworm Studios in Barford St Michael, Dave Pegg's studio, where his own band, Fairport Convention, made their records, and Pegg engineered and mixed the 1988 songs.

The inlay, drawn by Yorke, credits all five, with Jon Greenwood on keys, viola and harmonica, and three alto saxophones: Raz, and Liz and Charlotte Cotton. Record Collector had heard a rumour in 1996 of a horn section with two sax-playing sisters, and there they are. Charlotte Cotton later became a curator of photographs at the V&A.

Yorke wrote on the tape that three songs came before the rest and were the most recent recordings, from 1989. Those three, “Promise Me”, “Body(?) in a box” and “These are the Chains”, had never been heard when the cassette was sold at Omega in February 2021, for £6,000. The other three, “Happy Song”, “To Be a Brilliant Light” and “Sinking Ship”, had been going round online since 2006.

shindig

In June, July and August of 1990 they made a tape on a four-track in the village halls of Clifton Hampden and Nuneham Courtenay, and at home. Selway was in Ireland for the summer, so a school friend, Nigel Powell, later of Unbelievable Truth, sat in on drums, and Jonny took the four-track home to keep working with Yorke and Colin. They had dropped the name for the time being. The working one was Shindig, and Yorke spray-painted it on his guitar case.

It holds 15 songs. “The Greatest Shindig of the World” was rewritten as “Maquiladora”, and “How Can You Be Sure?” also ended up as a B-side in the time of The Bends.

A copy of the band's complete works reached Courtyard Studio through John Butcher, a classmate of Yorke and Colin. Chris Hufford, who ran the studio, said you couldn't hear any one band on it, and he would have let it go but for the 15th track, a weird looped-up dance thing. On the 1990 tape as it now circulates, the 15th track is “New Generation”.

the dungeon

At Easter 1991 they spent more than £300 on three ten-hour days at Dungeon Studios, on Ascott Hill Farm at Shipton-on-Stour, with the owner, Richard Haines, engineering. The tape has three songs: “What Is That You Say?”, “Stop Whispering” and “Give It Up”. Two of them had been reworked from the summer before. John Butcher took this one to Courtyard too.

These were great songs. Now they had an identity.

chris hufford · mojo, 1997

That summer they were all back in Oxford and in jobs: Yorke in an architect's office, O'Brien waiting tables at Browns, Colin behind the counter of the Our Price, Selway publishing a medical journal. O'Brien wrote to John Harris of Melody Maker on On a Friday notepaper asking him to come to a gig, and Harris ignored the letters. Colin handed a tape to Keith Wozencroft, an EMI sales rep about to move into A&R, who went to see them in a tent in an Oxford park with nobody watching but a couple of girlfriends. A booker at Moles in Bath sent the same tape to an agent, Charlie Myatt, who visited them in a cowshed.

Curfew, the Oxford monthly, reviewed two of the Dungeon songs in November, called On a Friday the reviewer's favourite local band, and reckoned the singer had a pitch-bend lever fitted in his throat.

first tapes

Hufford came to see them at the Jericho Tavern on 8 August 1991 and, by his own account, made a buffoon of himself bursting backstage to say he had to work with them. Courtyard, in the village of Sutton Courtenay, was a studio he and Bryce Edge rented and had kept going on a long session with Slowdive. In October the band recorded five songs there on 24 tracks for £500: “I Can't”, “Nothing Touches Me”, “Thinking About You”, “Phillipa Chicken” and “You”.

Its title was First Tapes, but it is known by the shop that sold it, Manic Hedgehog in Oxford, for £3. Yorke drew the insert: an alien head between the words “Work Sucks”.

Curfew put On a Friday on its cover in December, called them Oxford's thinnest band, and counted 25 A&R men at their latest Jericho Tavern show, every one of whom had paid to get in. The interview was done at the house they shared in Ridgefield Road.

We had a shared house, like The Monkees. Or we were more like the Banana Splits.

colin greenwood · bbc news, 13 march 2016

We're not going to sit around and wait and just be happy if something turns up. We are ambitious. You have to be.

thom yorke · curfew, december 1991

Hufford and Edge became their managers. EMI signed them, and when Rupert Perry, the main man at the label as Hufford put it, told Jonny his favourite song on the tape was “Phillipa Chicken”, Jonny told him they had dropped it. By the spring the name had gone too.

the tapes since

From the 1991 tapes, five songs went further. “Stop Whispering”, “You”, “I Can't” and “Thinking About You” were recorded again for Pablo Honey, and “Nothing Touches Me” was in the band's first Radio 1 session in June 1992. The rest stayed on the cassettes.

The cassettes did not stay put. In August 2002 the NME reported 13 On a Friday songs on the internet and could not vouch for all of them; the Shindig tape followed in January 2006, and the 1986 session in 2011 and 2012. In November 2012 someone listed four of the early tapes on eBay at $49,999.99. When the band opened the Radiohead Public Library in January 2020, nothing in it was older than Drill.

In 1996 Record Collector valued each of the two 1991 tapes at £30, ten times what Manic Hedgehog had charged for one.