The band

a school band

Radiohead started in 1985 at Abingdon School, south of Oxford, as On a Friday, named for the day they rehearsed in the school's music room. Thom Yorke sang, Colin Greenwood played bass and Ed O'Brien played guitar. Phil Selway, a sixth-former with a drum kit, was asked in, and he told BBC 6 Music in 2017 that he still remembers Yorke's opening line to him, which Alex Ross printed in The New Yorker as “Can't you play any fucking faster?” Colin's younger brother Jonny hung about with a harmonica in case anyone needed one, and has been in the band ever since. His page has how that went.

Then the older four left for college in different parts of the country, and the band should have ended there. Instead they had a plan to get back together after university, as Yorke told David Fricke of Rolling Stone in 2001, and they wrote in the holidays. Selway reckons they played seven or eight shows between starting and signing, and one of those was a ball at the London School of Economics where On a Friday, by then an eight-piece with three saxophones, opened for Boney M.

Chris Hufford and Bryce Edge ran a struggling studio at Sutton Courtenay, a few miles from the school, when a classmate of Yorke's brought Hufford a tape. He went to see them at the Jericho Tavern in Oxford and burst backstage saying he had to work with them. “We'd always thought managers were complete tossers,” he told Jim Irvin of Mojo in 1997, and the two of them took the job. The way to EMI ran through Colin's job behind a record-shop counter. By December 1991 the Oxford paper Curfew could count 25 A&R men who had paid to get into a packed Jericho, two weeks after a gig that drew one man from EMI.

EMI signed them for six albums between December 1991 and March 1992. The label wanted a better name than On a Friday, and they took one from “Radio Head”, a song on Talking Heads' True Stories.

We signed to… EMI and… we just said to them, we haven't got a clue what we're doing.

Thom Yorke · WTF with Marc Maron, 2013

a year as a jukebox

In rehearsal in 1992 with the American producers Sean Slade and Paul Q. Kolderie, Yorke mentioned “our Scott Walker song”, and Kolderie took him to mean a cover. “Too bad their best song's a cover,” Slade said. It was “Creep”. At Chipping Norton the band played it once, and the room applauded. Pablo Honey's page has the rest of the three weeks they took to make the record.

“Creep” came out in Britain that autumn, sold about 6,000 copies and reached number 78. It came back from abroad. An army radio DJ in Israel, Yoav Kutner, played it sometimes three times an hour, and when the band reached the Roxane in Tel Aviv in spring 1993 the first two nights were thin and the third, on 3 April, packed. W.A.S.T.E., the band's own newsletter, called the response one that “made Beatlemania look like a mild sedative”. San Francisco's Live 105 played an import and the phones went. The song reached number 34 on the Billboard Hot 100 that September and number seven on its British reissue, and they toured it.

Hufford steered them away from an arena tour with Duran Duran and on to a smaller one with Belly, and by the end of that they were asking whether they should be a group at all. “We joined this band to write songs and be musicians,” Jonny said. “But we spent a year being jukeboxes instead.”

Thom Yorke and Phil Selway with an Israeli Channel One presenter, Israel, 1993· Israeli Channel Onethe whole interview →

america, five times

EMI booked them nine weeks at RAK in London with the producer John Leckie from February 1994, aiming at an album by October, and it nearly finished them. The five kept leaving the room to huddle in meetings, and O'Brien remembers them all looking for a way out of the contract. They finished The Bends only after a tour of Australia and the Far East had reset them, and that October, in Mexico, they spent a day having it all out, with what Yorke describes as spitting, fighting and crying.

America was the plan after that, Hufford and Edge's plan as Kolderie saw it. They toured there five times between the release of The Bends in March 1995 and finishing OK Computer, as far as El Paso, where Colin told Rolling Stone most English bands would not end up.

Touring brought them friends, and other people's audiences. R.E.M. took them on in the summer of 1995, starting at Milton Keynes Bowl on 30 July, and Michael Stipe introduced himself to Yorke as “a very big fan”. Yorke's tour diary has him working out what that meant: “This is R.E.M. and they really like us. No, I mean they really like us.” In August 1996 they opened 13 dates for Alanis Morissette and tried new songs on her audience. “Lift” went down best of all, and stayed off the record.

Thom Yorke and Ed O'Brien on MTV's 120 Minutes, 1995· MTVthe whole interview →

ok computer

O'Brien counts one month off between 1993 and the middle of 1998: January 1996. Their manager's advice was that they could not stop until they could take time off and not be forgotten, and so they went from the road into OK Computer, with no producer in the old sense, only Nigel Godrich, in a converted apple shed near Didcot called Canned Applause and then at St Catherine's Court near Bath, with a cook for company. Choosing what went on it took weeks of argument. With five in the band, Yorke told KCRW, he ended up with the casting vote, and it cost him many sleepless nights.

Then came the part that broke them. The day of interviews after the Barcelona launch in May 1997 fell on Selway's 30th birthday, and he handed out cake between questions. Grant Gee came to film the launch and stayed for the tour, and the result, Meeting People Is Easy, is the record of what the next 11 months did. At Glastonbury on 28 June Yorke's monitors failed and the lighting computer crashed, and Michael Eavis, who runs the festival, called it the most inspiring festival set in 30 years; O'Brien called it “the worst night of our lives”. After the arena in Birmingham that November, Yorke could not speak. “I'd just so had enough,” he said.

Jonny Greenwood, Phil Selway, Colin Greenwood and Ed O'Brien on MTV Japan, April 1997· MTV Japanthe whole interview →

kid a and the tent

They went back to work still reeling, and it went badly. O'Brien wanted guitars and Yorke was tired of verse and chorus. Almost nothing came of a month in Paris, in Copenhagen they filled about 50 reels with no finished song, and at Batsford Park in Gloucestershire the five agreed to break up if they could not settle on an album. Yorke began to deny there had been rows to Rolling Stone and then took it back: “It wasn't huge fucking rows. No, there were. That's a lie. Completely.”

This is how they work. Their songs are credited to Radiohead as a group. Hufford's rule is that nothing goes ahead until all five say it is great, though “Thom definitely has the veto.” A string player on the sessions looked at this from outside and told Yorke, “Five boys together for over ten years, that is extraordinarily unhealthy.” Colin's own word was hermetic.

O'Brien's diary has the sessions in dated entries. By April 2000 they had 26 finished songs, and a manager suggested two records. Kid A came first, with no commercial single and no official video, and went to number one on both sides of the Atlantic. They took it round Britain that autumn in a purpose-built marquee, ten dates in parks from Newport to Warrington. On the night they played Saturday Night Live in New York, all five piled into one Jeep Cherokee and ignored the three limousines.

Amnesiac followed, and on 7 July 2001 they played South Park in Oxford, their first Oxford show since 1996, with two local bands picked from about 120 tapes. A keyboard died, and Yorke told the crowd, “Es ist kaputt, ja?” They closed with “Creep” for the first time since 1998. Asked the next day what he had made of the crowd, Colin said, “'Fraid not. I was too busy looking at Phil's calves. That's where the beats are.”

Ed O'Brien at Pinkpop, Landgraaf, June 2001· Pinkpop festivalthe whole interview →

the last album for emi

After that they wanted no great leap. They worked out new songs on stage in Portugal and Spain in the summer of 2002 and went straight to Ocean Way in Los Angeles that September, and Hail to the Thief was mostly down in under three weeks. “We did a track a day,” Yorke told Rolling Stone. “It was sort of like holiday camp.” Selway and O'Brien first worked out its running order, and Yorke said the rest of the band steered him back to its title when he got cold feet.

They went back to Glastonbury on 28 June 2003, six years to the day after the bad one. Eavis had told Paul McCartney no, because Radiohead held the Saturday, and the field kept singing after “Karma Police” had stopped. Hail to the Thief was the sixth album of the six. When the tour ended, in the spring of 2004, they had no label and nobody to answer to.

pay what you want

That turned out to be harder than it sounds. Yorke formally asked the others before he made The Eraser, and has said that without years of friendship the time could have split the band. Jonny, for his part, argued they needed a whip cracked over them. Two months with the producer Spike Stent came to little, and things moved only when Godrich came back. O'Brien looked back on In Rainbows at the music-industry fair Midem in 2010 and said that whether the band would go on had been “very much in the balance”. Their managers told them to split up, and they ignored it.

I no longer felt I wanted to be answerable to the Radiohead thing at all. And it's not that I wanted to… split with the band. I wanted to carry on working with the band.

Thom Yorke · The New York Times, 2007

Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood at Chicago Public Radio for Sound Opinions, June 2006· Sound Opinionsthe whole interview →

The idea that made them famous all over again came from the office. “The whole idea came from the management,” O'Brien told BBC Radio 1's Edith Bowman. Hufford and Edge floated letting buyers type in their own price in April 2007, and on 1 October Jonny wrote on the band's blog, “Well, the new album is finished, and it's coming out in 10 days. We've called it In Rainbows. Love from us all.”

EMI, under its new owner, would not talk about the back catalogue. “We made the sign of the cross and walked away,” Yorke wrote. They signed for one record at a time with XL and, in America, TBD. They also paid for a study of what touring cost the planet, which found that fans travelling to the shows made up most of it, and in 2008 they played city centres and sent the gear by sea. “Short of no-one coming to see us,” the band wrote, “we'd like to share with our fans some ways of reducing this.”

Colin Greenwood on MTV Canada, 15 August 2008, on the In Rainbows tour· MTV Canadathe whole interview →

the king of limbs

They went to the Grammys on 8 February 2009, played “15 Step” with the USC Trojan Marching Band and came home with two awards, and that March they toured South America for the first time. Yet In Rainbows had cost them so much that they agreed never to make a record that way again. Yorke told The Believer that summer he was not very interested in the album as a format at the moment, which set off talk of a split, and Colin told Prog, “Ha, ha, no, we're not going to be splitting up just yet.”

By May 2009 they were already back in their own studio with Godrich, and Colin described the new material as a box of bricks tipped out on the floor and picked through. The King of Limbs came out of that: eight tracks built from loops of their own playing, announced on a Monday in February 2011 and out on the Friday. Jonny said they thought it might not be playable, so Selway brought in a second drummer, and Clive Deamer played his first show with them, unbilled, at Glastonbury that June. He was with them on stage until 2018.

Phil Selway talking to RTÉ 2fm at Electric Picnic, Ireland, 4 September 2010the whole interview →

toronto

On 16 June 2012, at about 4pm, hours before the last North American show of the King of Limbs tour, the stage came down at Downsview Park in Toronto. It killed Scott Johnson, the band's drum technician, who was 33 and from Doncaster: a video screen fell on him. Three others were hurt. “He was a lovely man, always positive, supportive and funny,” the band said. Selway has said on CBC, “I actually should have been where Scott was,” and told The Globe and Mail what they asked themselves when they came away: “God, do we want to do this ever again?”

The band flew home, and all of them went to his funeral. Seven European dates moved to September. The crew were offered the chance to leave when the tour resumed at Nîmes on 10 July, and all of them stayed; the band ended that night on “Reckoner” with pictures of Johnson. Every 16 June, their business manager Ade Bullock says, those who were there mark it with a pepperoni pizza and a Peroni.

Charges were laid in 2013 against Live Nation, the staging firm Optex and an engineer. A judge's promotion caused a mistrial, and in September 2017 the case was stayed for delay, which the band called “an insult to the memory of Scott Johnson, his parents and our crew”. On their first night back in Toronto, 19 July 2018, Yorke said from the stage that “the silence is fucking deafening”. An Ontario inquest in 2019 returned a verdict of accidental death, with 28 recommendations.

a moon shaped pool

For three and a half years after Melbourne in November 2012 they did not play a night. Yorke had said what the years before it were like when he spoke to The Guardian in 2013: he “definitely felt trapped in the whole thing”, and thought they all had, particularly after they started to have children.

Thom, the singer in our band, once said that Radiohead's like the United Nations and he's America.

Colin Greenwood · 5FM, 2013

They went back into the studio with Godrich in 2014, and a day on one of O'Brien's songs told him his songs were not what the band were for; his page has that. A Moon Shaped Pool found its shape at La Fabrique in the south of France. On 1 May 2016 radiohead.com faded to white over about two hours and their social media emptied, a day after leaflets reached fans in Britain.

Their night in Tel Aviv on 19 July 2017 was the row of those years. More than 50 people signed an open letter asking them not to go. Yorke told Rolling Stone it was “deeply distressing” that the signatories chose to “throw shit at us in public”, and Radiohead played 27 songs, their longest set in 11 years. It did not end there. In 2025 four of the five spoke about it in The Sunday Times, and Selway said that distancing the band from Jonny, whose wife Sharona Katan is an Israeli artist, would mean the end of them.

They closed in Philadelphia on 1 August 2018 with “Karma Police”, and stopped. “I guess the wheels came off a bit,” Yorke said later. “I was done with Radiohead,” O'Brien told Rolling Stone in 2026. “I think we'd run out of road.”

no radiohead at the moment

On 29 March 2019 the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame took them in at the Barclays Center, with David Byrne to do it, and two of the five came. Selway and O'Brien stood up, and O'Brien said, “I wish the others could be here.” That June Jonny wrote that someone had stolen Yorke's MiniDisc archive from the OK Computer years and reportedly demanded $150,000 for it, and the band put the lot, about 16 hours, on Bandcamp for 18 days at £18 for Extinction Rebellion. “So for £18 you can find out if we should have paid that ransom,” he wrote.

They were otherwise apart. Yorke and Jonny started The Smile, O'Brien and Selway made records of their own, which the year dial below lists, and Colin played on other people's. The nearest thing to a band event was Kid A Mnesia, and its exhibition, in the end, was software, free for PlayStation 5, Mac and Windows. “There's no Radiohead at the moment,” O'Brien said on a podcast in 2022. “It has to be five people going, 'I really want to do this again with you.'”

the round

It began, O'Brien says, at Jonny's 50th, standing round a fire talking to Yorke. In 2024 they met on a Thursday morning at The Church in Crouch End, where they had finished OK Computer. Everyone was there by 10.55. They started with “Planet Telex” and were through The Bends and OK Computer by lunch. Colin told NME, “We were going to do three or four days but knocked it on the head after two.” Asked by the newsletter The New Cue, he compared it to “taking the old car out for a run before putting it back in the garage”.

The car stayed out. On 4 November 2025, seven years after Philadelphia, they opened in Madrid with “Let Down”, the first of 20 arena nights across Europe, played in the round. The last time, they said, was in 1993, supporting Ned's Atomic Dustbin. Yorke, O'Brien and Selway picked each night's set from Yorke's list of 65 songs a few hours before, and nothing came from Pablo Honey. On that first night the five walked to the stage through the crowd. “I wanted to burst into tears, and we hadn't even played a note,” Yorke told Harry Styles in Rolling Stone. Jonny told The Times he found it strange to tour nothing new.

I think we felt the friendship sort of come back.

Ed O'Brien · Apple Music, 2026

There has been no new Radiohead studio album since 2016. There are 21 more nights in 2027, in Perth, Melbourne, Sydney and Saitama, all sold out. The dearest ticket came with items, the band's announcement said, by Stanley Donwood and Doktor Tchock, Yorke's name as an artist, “with their customary attention to irrelevance”. In February 2026 the five were named directors of a company newly registered at Companies House. They called it Futile Endeavours Limited.