Colin Greenwood on BBC Radio Ulster

Colin Greenwood, ambassador for Independent Venue Week, tells BBC Radio Ulster's Arts Extra that no band can “parachute into an arena overnight like James Bond did at the Olympics”. Radiohead had the Jericho Tavern, a smallish pub in north-west Oxford, and a promoter, Mac, who did not care what a band played as long as they were passionate about it. He booked Primal Scream, Pulp and Giant Sand too, and was the first promoter in Britain, Greenwood says, to book the White Stripes and the Strokes, so a kid in Oxford could watch great bands three metres away and think he could do that. The band were On a Friday then, because they rehearsed on Fridays. They supported A House there on borrowed gear, and later went round the country with young Irish bands such as the Frank and Walters and the Sultans of Ping FC.

In Belfast he remembers the university, around 1993, playing with Strangelove under speakers that seemed dotted at random above the stage. The opposite of an intimate gig a few feet from the band, he says, is Reading and Leeds, where Radiohead traded headline nights with Arctic Monkeys and Kings of Leon. The crowd was so far off that the headliners could not hear it in their in-ear monitors, and the engineers had to mix crowd noise in, because otherwise “it sounded like you were playing to an empty field” and not to 60,000 people shouting.