When Styles brought up “High and Dry” as a classic, Yorke called it a man with an acoustic guitar singing. That particular one I wish I hadn't [winces in pain], but there's nothing wrong with that.¹ He rarely listens to singer-songwriters, he says, and would rather have old folk, film music and electronic music; he links The Bends to a revival of that style when the band were young.

Above everything, Styles loves “Everything in Its Right Place”, and Yorke told him where it came from. He had felt lost since OK Computer and could not write. The song was the first thing he did after moving into a house that held a grand piano, a mattress and nothing else, and through a stormy winter he played the riff again and again like a mantra, with a single Arvo Pärt CD in the house. He could not write another one now even if he wanted to, and he has tried. Around Kid A and Amnesiac every new step was a struggle that he kept explaining to himself as he went, which he likens to madness; his way out was to leave the studio and walk the Cornish cliffs. One Kid A vocal was Yorke speaking lines pulled at random from a top hat while Jonny Greenwood played the ondes Martenot. Only after that record did he quietly tell Nigel Godrich that he wanted to make some things with him alone.

Being honoured at the Ivor Novello Awards in May, where Styles paid tribute and called Radiohead his favourite band, made Yorke see that he is a songwriter, though he does not mix with songwriters. He calls songwriting naive, because the good material turns up and he cannot say why. “Pyramid Song” is three chords repeated with one lyric, and it works when it should not. The fellowship itself confused him, he admits, and he has a very strange relationship with that side of his work. His children, Agnes and Noah, and his wife, Dajana, were moved on the night. He went for them, and felt numb.

In The Smile, Jonny Greenwood produces ideas constantly, Tom Skinner is quicker than anyone Yorke has met, and Yorke responds without always understanding what is going on. Radiohead, whose members met in 1985, know each other's strengths and weaknesses, he says, and spend much of their time working around them. We haven't been in the studio together for a long time, so I don't know how it would actually feel now.¹

What brought him round, two months after the tour, was starting work on his own record again. He has an odd relationship with being celebrated, he says, but has got used to that. Rolling Stone says the solo album is under way but has not been announced, and that the band play residencies in Australia and Japan in the middle of next year.

The magazine counts the 2025 concerts as Radiohead's first in seven years, and Yorke remembers the nerves at the first of them, in Madrid. The band walked through the audience to reach the stage, which they had never done before, then waited on stage together while they were made ready, the first time in years they had gone on as one. Everyone was telling everyone else to hold it together. I wanted to burst into tears, and we hadn't even played a note.¹

Emmanuel Stranadica, reviewing in French for Sound Of Violence, found the hall not sold out but well filled. ESKA opened the night. The set closed with “Brasil”, which got the hall dancing, and “Obrigado”. Introducing “Sail On”, O'Brien said he had felt a little ill that morning and had been lifted by the spirit of resistance he saw outside a school that day. In a break he told the hall that, for all his years in a band, he was not used to being out front.

Setlist, Salle Pleyel, Paris, 8 October 2026

Setlist as printed by Sound Of Violence. The concert ran 1 hour 35 minutes.

He told Todesco he does not know what he is doing, and that he has no wish to show off, which is not in his nature. Sono a inizio carriera, sono un principiante¹ (“I'm at the start of my career, I'm a beginner”, in our translation).

He also spoke about psilocybin mushrooms, which he finds a form of therapy and calls plant medicine. Non faccio spesso uso di psichedelici, una o due volte all'anno prendo funghi alla psilocibina¹ (“I don't often use psychedelics; once or twice a year I take psilocybin mushrooms”, in our translation). Psilocybin, he said, lifts a veil, so that things become visible.

The first remake, he says, was for the 2017 edition marking twenty years of OK Computer, and another celebrated thirty years of the Big Issue, which he describes as the UK magazine set up to help homeless people. All of those were black and white, and all were pasted up on abandoned buildings around London.

The new edition is 99 copies at £123, each signed and numbered by Donwood and blind-stamped with the shop's seal. It measures 600 by 450 mm. Donwood signs off the listing by apologising, not very seriously, to anyone who finds the image unpleasant. What? You don't like it? You think it's horrible and disturbing? Oh no! What have I done? Sorry!¹

The theatre was far from full. Rolling Stone Italia calls it nowhere near sold out, and Rockol points out that Milan had two concerts a night that week. Adnkronos, also writing in Italian, has his first words to the crowd as good to be back in Milan, with a little Italian thrown in. Several times he came to the front and urged people to stand, while allowing that a Tuesday night makes that hard.

Milan was the second night of the tour, two days after Amsterdam. There were no Radiohead songs in the set. O'Brien came on without a guitar and, after “Thin Places”, played a pared-back “Incantations” with Dave Okumu, to whom he handed much of the lead guitar. The song came back later with the whole band, longer and more psychedelic. “Single File”, which did not make Blue Morpho, began as a dance piece and became a long rock jam; Adnkronos counts it among the best moments. “Brasil” grew from a quiet start into a long groove, the crowd repeating “Milano, andiamo”. ESKA, who had opened the night with Okumu, took the lead in the long closing “Obrigado”.

In an interview with Sibilla months earlier, O'Brien had named the Grateful Dead as a model for this tour. Mi interessano quei luoghi in cui loro portavano le canzoni, allungandole. Mi interessa davvero quel tipo di spazio. Chissà se riusciremo ad arrivarci¹ (“I'm interested in those places where they took songs, stretching them out. I'm really interested in that kind of space. Who knows if we'll get there”, in our translation). In Milan, Sibilla judges, they got there.

Setlist, Teatro Lirico Giorgio Gaber, Milan, 6 October 2026

Setlist as given by Panorama, Rockol and Rockon.it.

The band (as listed by Panorama)

In 2002 Yorke played the Bridge School Benefit, Young's charity concert in California. At an evening at Young's house the night before, he asked if he could play “After the Gold Rush”. The grand piano Young mostly writes on stood on a slant with a broken leg, and Young told him to play the song on the piano it was written on, his old upright. At the concert Young stood at the side of the stage while Yorke played it, the song that closed his first night there.

That was the most in awe I've ever been of anybody, really, I think. I was so nervous.

Thom Yorke¹

Yorke remembers Young watching almost everyone's set from the side of that stage, and once watched him play “Cortez the Killer” there with Pearl Jam as his band.

Yorke first heard of Young at 15 or 16, when a magazine he had sent a demo tape to said he sounded like him. He bought After the Gold Rush and identified with Young's voice straight away; he has this soft vibrato that nobody else does¹, he says. When Radiohead were starting to gig, Young's live album Weld was one of their big records.

All through what's happened with [Radiohead], I've always ended up falling back on a Neil Young record. It didn't really matter which one.

Thom Yorke¹

Dave Okumu, a friend of O'Brien's for some twenty years, leads the band as musical director. He and bassist Robin Mullarkey had already backed ESKA in her support slot. Her party piece was to have everyone start Philip Glass's “Opening” on their phones together and sing over the dozens of copies. She returned to sing in O'Brien's set, where, to van der Vring's ear, her voice carried better.

Alongside the new album came three songs from Earth, his 2020 debut, and “Single File”, a track cut from Blue Morpho. “Incantations” was played twice, the second time longer, with the whole band. Live, van der Vring felt, the record's folk and ambient balance lost some delicacy to louder guitars, but the songs grew more physical, shaped by Okumu's guitar. “Obrigado” closed the set, as it closes the album.

Setlist, Koninklijk Theater Carré, Amsterdam, 4 October 2026

Written in Music's setlist box stops at “Brasil”; its review says “Obrigado” closed the set.

The band

Adrian Utley and Glenn Kotche, who play on the album, are not in the touring band.

When his first album came out in 2020, just off a Radiohead tour, he was unwell and afraid of a great deal. Now he no longer cares and simply gets on with it, which has been freeing. Time in nature has helped too. He has had therapy himself, but thinks people in cities need it most. He hates artificial intelligence, and cannot picture Radiohead using it.

He says going back on tour with Radiohead last year was powerful and moving. They tour again next year. They have not discussed recording new music at all, so he has no idea what will happen, though he understands that fans want a new album. He says time on their own projects is good for them, and coming back together for shows is wonderful. He likens the long years in the band to living at home with family, a home everyone leaves at some point to make their own.

The film is made from the sketches, paintings, collages and handwritten notes of the Kid A and Amnesiac sessions, with artwork by Stanley Donwood and Thom Yorke. Its sound is a new mix by Nigel Godrich from the original multitracks, played in six-point surround, and the galleries around the cinema hang the band's artwork at full size.

Motion Picture House: KID A MNESIA

Radio Rewrite is the piece Reich wrote in 2012 on “Everything In Its Right Place” and “Jigsaw Falling Into Place”, first played by the Sinfonietta the year after. Greenwood told Eddi Fiegel of The i Paper before the concert that he found it insanely complimentary⁴, and that he still could not believe Reich had done it.

Clive Paget, reviewing the concert for The Guardian, praises his spotless technique in Electric Counterpoint and the personality he gave it, which he finds rare in Reich. Richard Maguire of The Reviews Hub could not work out which notes were live and which recorded, and searched the stage for a loop pedal that was not there. Agnes Kory, at Seen and Heard International, had no idea the bass player in Pulse was anyone famous, and found he played like a regular in the ensemble and his Electric Counterpoint exciting. When the Sinfonietta takes the programme to Budapest on 12 October, the Hungarian jazz guitarist Bálint Gyémánt plays in Greenwood's place.

Greenwood has been playing Electric Counterpoint since 2011, and these days he plays the guitar every day, after years of distrusting fluent playing. In the early days of Radiohead I always felt like a clumsy guitar player and was always lazy but now, just through repetition, I've got hooked.⁴ He told the i about one performance of it in Poland, with Reich in the room. According to the sound guy, he punched the air when the bass guitar came in. Unless he was shaking his fist at me.⁴

The programme

Every ticket goes by draw. Each person may apply once for each show, for up to four tickets, ranking the seat types from first choice to fifth. A seat type that reaches its planned count stops taking applications, and the official Japan site says it will have no general sale.

The tickets are designated event tickets, which cannot be resold or passed on. The site names Viagogo, StubHub, Ticket Ryutsu Center and ticketjam as unofficial sellers and will not guarantee entry on a ticket bought anywhere but eplus. At the door the buyer's name is checked against original photo ID, and it cannot be changed for any reason, even to a family member's.

Fans who need the accessible area buy a B reserved seat and then apply through a form.

Seats run from ¥15,000 for B reserved to ¥30,000 for SS reserved. Of every ticket, ¥200 goes to more trees, a forest conservation group, and the band match the total. At the top sits the ¥59,800 Fast Track Status package, whose blurb promises real priority perks and, in the same breath, no business-class lounge.

It began in 2022, when Donwood visited the East London studio where The Smile were recording their first album and brought his materials with him: gold leaf, black Japanese ink, walnut ink and mulberry paper. They drew because drawing makes less mess in a studio than painting. A drawing also cannot be painted over, so every slip stays in it.

These works show the history of our mistakes.

Thom Yorke¹

Donwood drew the buildings in the flat isometric projection, which he likens to Chinese and Japanese painting and to IKEA instructions. He says that with no perspective there is no depth, and so no time. Yorke added the figures, taken from people half seen in the background of webcam stills. Neither will call the work dystopian. Yorke points instead to the developers' hoardings around London that sell a future of laptops and coffee, and asks where people fit in it. The title is a line from one of his notebooks, written after a hotel lift refused his keycard once too often, and his short texts hang beside the drawings. They worked to murmuring voices on the radio and a lot of atonal music, where their earlier work had stayed close to Radiohead's records.

Yorke traces the series back to Kid A Mnesia, planned as an exhibition in 2021, which became an installation and a game when Covid ruled out a show. He calls that time one of pathological productivity, and this time they wanted something small. Donwood calls Amsterdam, like Venice, a low-key preview and says they hope to do something big next. Yorke says they will, once they know what it is.

Earlier in the year, on the chart dated 9 January, In Rainbows hit a new high of number seven on vinyl and reached number nine on the sales chart, with OK Computer one place behind. It was the album's first time in the sales top 10, more than 18 years after it came out.

UK charts dated 18 September 2026

Horgan plays Alex, a divorced 50-year-old who learns early in “Lockjaw” that she has arthritis in her jaw. At the end of the episode, moments after Alex has been with her on-off partner Patrick (Rupert Friend), her 18-year-old son Ruari turns up home from college unannounced. Ruari, played by Cillian Murphy's son Aran Murphy, climbs into her bed and falls asleep, and she lies there thinking as the song plays.

Horgan tells TheWrap the episode was always going to end that way. I'd written that it was going to be Radiohead, whether we got [the song] or not. I'd written that into the script a year and a half ago.¹

The two have been friends since both lived in Los Angeles in the early 2000s. During the pandemic Harrison went to Godrich for advice on his 2023 album Innerstanding, and later lent him one of his late father's tape machines, the one Shankar Family & Friends was recorded on. On it, at Godrich's studio in Brixton, the pair jammed while Godrich picked out the passages he liked, and those loops became the songs. Nothing was programmed on a computer. “Slower”, the first song they made, in a few hours, opens the eight tracks, and the last ends on crickets Harrison caught on a small Zoom recorder one night in Australia.

Harrison saw one of the first shows by Thom Yorke and Godrich's band that became Atoms for Peace, at the Orpheum Theatre in 2009, and says it made him want to quit music. I went home and I was like, Oh, they've already done all the things I want to do.¹

The night before the release they played “Slower” on ABC's Jimmy Kimmel Live!, their late-night TV debut, and at the Masonic Lodge Harrison pointed out that strictly speaking Kimmel had been their first gig. The band walked through the audience to reach the stage, and near the end told the room there would be no encore, with “In Between” and “End Of World” still to come. Godrich plays bass and will not use prerecorded backing tracks, so Nick Valensi of the Strokes is on guitar, Joey Waronker on drums, with Maurice Talbot and two backing singers. He won't even let me use six Kaoss Pads onstage.¹

A second night in the same room follows on 19 September, with Paris and London in November, both part of the Pitchfork Music Festival.

Dates

They already have enough songs for a second album; more touring waits on Godrich finishing a couple of records he is producing. I got bored of being Dhani Harrison anyway¹, Harrison says. I like being Dragonflies now.¹

Only registered fans drawn in the ballot could buy, from 9am local time on Tuesday 15 September. By 4pm Frontier Touring, the promoter, said one Sydney show had gone and two more were limited, along with all six Melbourne nights and one of the four in Perth. Official resale, only through the authorised agencies and capped at face value plus permitted fees, opens a month before each city's shows.

The Sydney Morning Herald reported fans thrown out of the queue before they could choose, and others after picking their seats. The “best possible” seat option stalled, PayPal and Apple Pay payments failed and some cards were declined. Some users of AXS, which sold Melbourne, were told they could not reach its queue. Each buyer was allowed four tickets for one city, yet some said they were offered four tickets to each of several shows.

Official resale and transfers

ATB Guitars, the dealer that offered it earlier this year, traces it to a July 2006 soundcheck picture of Greenwood on Dead Air Space, the band's blog. It was posted under the heading “America” with the file named “jonnynewguitar”. After that it turns up again and again in the studio pictures from Tottenham House and Halswell House over the winter of 2006 and 2007, among them “Back at the House” and “Set Up 1” in March 2007.

The Tennessean left Greenwood's collection through one of Radiohead's guitar technicians, whom ATB names as Pete Clements, the band's tech of many years. The dealer adds that the guitar still carries a headstock sticker and a case badge from Mozart, the music shop in Norfolk, Virginia, that first sold it.

At one show on that year's US tour, Radiohead were opening for Tears for Fears on a bill with another band whose drummer was Blondie's Clem Burke. Clem was my absolute drummer hero but I just hit peak overwhelm, and my drumming went off a cliff.⁶ Each of his limbs seemed to move at its own speed, and pressing the kick drum was like shoving at a heavy door.

It was the band's second long tour of 1993. They had been signed after five or six years of playing almost nowhere but Oxford, and spent 1992 driving a van between small venues. Selway had withdrawn into himself and felt far from home, an impostor in America, and the anxiety came out in his drumming, where for other people it comes out as drink or drugs. He could talk to his wife only on very expensive phone calls. By the end of the tour it showed, and afterwards one of Radiohead's managers asked him for a chat and raised it gently, which he calls invaluable. He watched how other bands coped, and James, and later R.E.M., both of whom Radiohead supported, became mentors of a kind.

On their European tour last autumn, Radiohead's touring party had confidential access to MITC's therapists: introductory sessions during rehearsals and the production build, then drop-in therapy for anyone on the tour. Even though we're a cohesive, well-resourced and very experienced touring party, we knew that you can still never completely guard against the trip hazards of touring.¹ He says nothing like it exists for bands in the small venues where Radiohead began. There is no margin there, and the band load the gear and drive themselves. I'd have really appreciated something like the Pay It Forward Fund back in Radiohead's early days, so that's the kind of space I hope it can provide.⁶

The fund raised £272,000 at launch, enough for 50 touring teams a year over a three-year pilot, each getting ten confidential online check-ins with a qualified practitioner, open to anyone on the tour.

Selway joined the Samaritans as a student and was a listening volunteer for 15 years before becoming an ambassador. Samaritans volunteers were at each of Radiohead's four nights at the O2 last November. On Bluesky yesterday, around World Suicide Prevention Day, he marked 40 years since he first trained as a listening volunteer. He gave the Samaritans number, 116 123, and wrote that suicidal thoughts can be interrupted and that a small act of care can save a life.

The concert was Bond and Beyond, a night of Bond title songs at the Royal Albert Hall presented by the comedian Nick Mohammed, with Lulu as the surprise guest singing her 1974 “The Man with the Golden Gun”. Louise Penn gave it five stars for BroadwayWorld and wrote that the theme once thought too dark for the film shone. Ivan Hewett, in the Telegraph, found most of the programme alike and named the moody Radiohead song as one of the few things in it that sounded different.

Earlier in the season, Simon Hale's arrangement of “Pyramid Song” for choir and orchestra was played at a Late Night Prom built around the percussionist Evelyn Glennie on 11 August. Harry Mayes, reviewing the late show for The Reviews Hub, found the BBC Singers' layers so thick that the words melted into texture, and thought the arrangement better for it.

On 8 September the BBC put its film of “Spectre” on YouTube, with Bartholomew-Poyser introducing the song from the stage.

Radiohead at the 2026 Proms

Each city gets one arena for its whole run, four nights in Perth and six each in Melbourne and Sydney. It is the band's first time in Australia since The King of Limbs tour in November 2012. The Japanese nights are at GMO Arena Saitama, which under its old name, Saitama Super Arena, held two nights of Radiohead's last headline run in Japan, in October 2008. Their last visit was to headline Summer Sonic in 2016.

Ed O'Brien said in March that the plan was a different continent and 20 shows each year, so the band have gone one over. Last year's 20 nights in five European cities were their first since 2018. No new album has been announced, and O'Brien has told NME the band have not talked about one.

There is no general sale in Australia. To keep out bots and scalpers, fans register with Frontier Touring, the promoter, and in Japan tickets are sold through an eplus lottery. Every Australian ticket carries A$2 for Greenpeace Australia Pacific and the Australian Marine Conservation Society, and every Japanese one ¥200 for the forest charity More Trees. Radiohead match both.

The dearest ticket, a “Fast Track Status” package at A$649 or ¥59,800, buys an SS seat, early entry to the merchandise stand and items designed by Stanley Donwood & Doktor Tchock, with their customary attention to irrelevance²⁵. The band's blurb also promises a light application of sarcasm²⁵, and admits there is still no Business Lounge.

New Zealand is not on the list. Stuff called it a snub, and Chris Schulz wrote in his newsletter Boiler Room that he had been through the Radiohead racks at Real Groovy in Auckland looking for a flyer and found nothing.

The 2027 dates

Greenwood last played Israel in 2024, when a Tel Aviv concert with Tassa led the BDS movement to call for a boycott of Radiohead's next tour. In May 2025 the pair called off their UK shows, citing threats.

In Radiohead's Sunday Times Magazine interview last October, Thom Yorke said he would not play Israel while Benjamin Netanyahu is prime minister, though he understood Greenwood's position given his roots there. Greenwood said the only thing he was ashamed of was dragging Yorke and the others into it. I'm not ashamed of working with Arab and Jewish musicians. I can't apologize for that¹.

Yorke made the show with the directors Steven Hoggett and Christine Jones, who worked together on Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and American Idiot. He took the album apart into a score that the cast of musicians and actors plays live on stage; Radiohead themselves are not in it. The play is cut hard, to about an hour and 40 minutes with no interval, and its Elsinore is a surveillance state whose lies Hamlet and Ophelia learn of from ghosts and from the music.

London follows the world premiere at Aviva Studios in April 2025 and a season with the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon that summer, and both sold out.

Paul Hilton again doubles Claudius and the Ghost, and Claudia Harrison plays Gertrude. Among the new names, Miles Barrow is Rosencrantz and Merryl Ansah the Gravedigger, and Halim Diwani, one of the understudies, will make his professional stage debut. The whole band from the first night in Manchester is back, led by Tom Brady as music supervisor and music director.

I'm into finally bringing 'Hamlet Hail to The Thief' to London, and to the Barbican of all places!

Thom Yorke⁸

Yorke said when the Barbican announced the run in June. For Jones the building itself was the point. Bringing this brutal play into the Barbican's brutalist space seems fated.⁸

The run

He also explained why Hildur Guðnadóttir took over the score of Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Bride! at the last minute. One Battle After Another was taking all his energy, and he had fallen ill and was recovering from sepsis. He says he is well again now. Even in hospital he was still sending music for The Bride!. I remember having my guitar in the hospital and sending him cues of me trying to play the solo guitar stuff.⁴ He has not seen the finished film.

Greenwood remembers Anderson dropping in on Radiohead at Ocean Way in Los Angeles during the Hail to the Thief sessions, to invite the band to a cast-and-crew screening of Punch-Drunk Love. On Anderson's films he works alone, with no team and no arrangers. It lets him obsess over a score but holds him to one film a year, two at most. About five years ago he decided against getting a team together. He says Anderson finds it funny to watch him work, because it looks like amateur hour, just Greenwood, paper and a printer that does not work.

For One Battle After Another he built small drum-hitting machines out of solenoids, run by software he wrote himself, and gave a piano the same treatment. Much of the film's piano is voice memos from his iPhone, which Anderson liked for the sound of someone working a thing out.

On 14 August, the opening day of Summer Sonic, the screens at the festival's Tokyo site ran a short clip of Radiohead live footage that ended on the words TOKYO 2027. Fan video of it was on TikTok and Reddit the same day. The festival ran in Chiba, outside Tokyo, and in Osaka on the same three days, but the clip named only Tokyo. Radiohead headlined Summer Sonic in 2003 and 2016, and those were their last concerts in Japan.

Naoki Shimizu, president of Creativeman, the promoter that runs Summer Sonic, said on the festival's radio broadcast during the weekend that everyone was asking whether the teaser meant a festival slot or a show of Radiohead's own. We negotiated it as a headline tour, and they have finally let us show a teaser here, so they will definitely come next year.⁴ He did not expect the tour to go to many places, guessing that in Asia and Oceania it would reach only Australia and Japan, and he expected fans to fly in from all over the world.

Ed O'Brien said in March that from 2027 Radiohead would play about 20 shows a year, on a different continent each year, naming Asia and Oceania among them, and he has since called 20 a ceiling rather than a target.

Cards found in Tokyo after the festival lead to a W.A.S.T.E. page built the same way, with 2027 and the city in the address. Flyers like them turned up in London, Madrid, Berlin and Copenhagen in early September 2025, just before Radiohead announced their 20-night European tour, their first in seven years.

He has always loved going to Japan, he says, old Japan in particular. He remembers Radiohead touring there within about a year of their first album. Their first shows there were at the Club Quattro venues in Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya in June 1994. He praised shinrin-yoku, the Japanese practice of forest bathing, and says a modern life that never stops is bad for us without time in nature.

The dark period behind Blue Morpho was one he needed, O'Brien says. After a lifetime of being busy came stillness, and with it time to face his childhood, cold showers, and a guitar he took up as a kind of therapy.

I was in a dark place, but it wasn't a bad place to be. It was a very necessary place to be.

Ed O'Brien²

The motifs he recorded on his iPhone in that time became the album, which he made with Paul Epworth and Riley MacIntyre. To him Radiohead and Blue Morpho are two different worlds. The band is old and familiar and built on a deep friendship; the solo record is new, and takes him outside his comfort zone as a singer as well as a guitarist. For O'Brien, music is essentially mathematical intervals in patterns. But those patterns and mathematical intervals can represent a very strong human emotion.²

It was made public on 17 August, the day the government's consultation on Rosebank closed. The musicians write that the climate crisis is no longer a worry for later generations, with heatwaves already disrupting schools, hospitals and transport as well as festivals and concerts. They say most of Rosebank's oil would be sold abroad, and that the field would neither bring down household bills nor make the country's energy supply more secure.

Eno, one of EarthPercent's founders, told Burnham he could stand with the fossil fuel industry or with the people who will live with the consequences of approving Rosebank.

The CHV interview ran on 10 August, and a shorter one in Ecuador's El Universo followed on 17 August. Both were about Blue Morpho, which El Universo calls his second solo album, released in May and recorded at his home in Wales. CHV traces it to a dark stretch that began in 2021. In lockdown, with his children studying remotely and his wife working, he took to playing alone behind a closed door, which he said could be a kind of therapy. The title comes from a blue morpho butterfly he saw during six months the family once spent on a farm in Brazil, and he calls the record a love letter to the Earth.

He told CHV he feels deep gratitude for meeting his four bandmates, and now sees the band's highs and lows as very beautiful. To El Universo he said he tries to set Radiohead aside a little in his own work, since it can be overwhelming, and that he is against anything to do with artificial intelligence: art, he said, needs to be made more human.

It is her third time on the segment as lead artist; she first came to notice on the Australian version of The Voice, singing as Celia Pavey. She used the same session to premiere “Maze”, a new song from her next record.

Blue told triple j she finds the song heartbreaking and relatable. I think the whole point of the version was to keep the raw emotion of the original song there², she says.

Nonesuch calls the film an Academy Award winner. The label put the score out last September, the sixth of Greenwood's scores for Anderson it has released. It has 18 new pieces, played by the London Contemporary Orchestra under Hugh Tieppo-Brunt, with Greenwood on piano, guitar, bass, percussion and the ondes Martenot.

The Smile turned down interviews, especially at first. Around the first album in 2022 Skinner said he was not allowed to talk about the band; now he was happy to. Mitsutaka Nagira met him at his Tokyo hotel in July, when Skinner was in Japan with his own band.

The three met in Oxford a few weeks after the email and spent about the first two days just jamming. Greenwood was driving it and brought riffs and ideas, one of them “The Smoke”, which was then only a riff; Yorke brought ideas too. Skinner says it was not an audition at all. Yorke and Greenwood then went on tour with Radiohead, and the three met again about a year later, early in 2019. After rehearsals they spent two weeks at Godrich's studio, and most of A Light for Attracting Attention, at least its foundations, was recorded there. The pandemic held it back until 2022.

He already knew all three. Around 2005 or 2006 he played on three or four tracks of Zero 7's The Garden at Godrich's studio, with Godrich engineering. Greenwood wanted a jazz group for some scenes of The Master and found a YouTube video of Zed-U, Skinner's trio with Shabaka Hutchings and Neil Charles. Skinner and Hutchings play on “Able-Bodied Seamen”. He met Yorke in 2013, when the Owiny Sigoma Band, a Kenyan and London group he played in, opened Atoms for Peace's European tour.

The drums on “Skrting on the Surface” are a single live take, recorded before the song existed. Yorke said afterwards that they had caught something special, and Skinner felt the same. It is the song he names as most his own. “Thin Thing” was put together by editing jams, and “A Hairdryer” came out of one that ran about ten minutes.

With one album out, the band did not have the songs for a full set, so much of Wall of Eyes and Cutouts was written at soundchecks on tour and sometimes played that night. Skinner names “Read the Room”, “Under Our Pillows”, “Friend of a Friend” and “Bending Hectic”, whose opening draws on Bennie Maupin's The Jewel in the Lotus. “Eyes & Mouth” was recorded for the first album and dropped, and the band kept playing it live until they caught a studio take they liked. The last two albums came largely from the same sessions, with about 25 songs on hand. Many made neither record, and Skinner says they could still take shape.

Kid A is the Radiohead record that hit him hardest, because it made him realise a rock band could make music like that.

The Proms named him among The Unthanks' guests in early June. English Teacher, the Leeds band led by Lily Fontaine, played three of their own songs with the orchestra. Conor O'Brien of Villagers pulled out before the night because of illness in his family, and The Unthanks still sang his “I Want What I Don't Need” without him.

Ellie Slorach conducted a programme that put songs from across The Unthanks' records beside traditional North East songs, all newly arranged for the orchestra, among them Johnny Handle's “Felton Lonnin” and Lal Waterson's “At First She Starts”. The concert opened this year's Proms in the North East.

For the sisters it was close to a homecoming. They grew up in Ryton on Tyneside, but their father is from Middlesbrough and their mother from Redcar, and their only earlier Prom was at the Royal Albert Hall in 2018. Rachel and Becky Unthank have parents from Teesside and lots of family still living there so playing in Middlesbrough is always a special event for us¹, Adrian McNally of The Unthanks said when the guests were announced.

What Radio 3 broadcast

The series gives each record shop-exclusive vinyl and new liner notes. This one comes with an insert of stories and interviews from people behind the album.

The entry, credited to Georgia from Rough Trade's office, recalls an album that came out as piracy was eating into CD sales and was sold for whatever buyers chose to pay. It says the move split the industry between those who saw a new way to reach fans and those who saw an unfair expectation for less successful bands.

Colin took the job in September 2024, when illness kept Casey off the band's UK and European tour; he had reportedly already played on some of the sessions for Wild God, the 2024 album the tour is named after. He kept it for North America in spring 2025. When the Wild God tour reached Australia in January, Bob Gordon of Rolling Stone Australia wrote that he was still filling in for Casey and called his bass playing strident. At the Domain in Sydney he was introduced as Radiohead's bassist and stood at centre stage.

The Australian shows began with “Frogs” from Wild God and ended with Cave alone at the piano for “Into My Arms”. Around Colin were Warren Ellis, Jim Sclavunos, George Vjestica, Larry Mullins and Carly Paradis on keyboards, with four backing singers.

He was back in the line-up when the European summer opened at Malahide Castle near Dublin on 10 June. Ruby Eastwood gave that night five stars in The Irish Times, put it at nearly three hours and named “Hollywood” its high point. The 24-song set closed with the Pogues' “A Rainy Night in Soho”, for Shane MacGowan.

On the morning of the Brighton show the band played four unannounced songs from the roof of Resident Records in the North Laine, beginning with “Train Long-Suffering” and taking in T. Rex's “Cosmic Dancer”. At Preston Park that night, the Bad Seeds' first Brighton show since 2013, Kylie Minogue came out for “Where the Wild Roses Grow”, her 1995 duet with Cave. Fucking Brighton! This is overwhelming. Deeply overwhelming⁸

Dates

It is Godrich's first music as a band member since Ultraísta's Sister in 2020, and Joey Waronker, his bandmate in Ultraísta and Atoms for Peace, adds percussion. Release day is booked as a concert at the Masonic Lodge at Hollywood Forever in Los Angeles; it sold out, and on 31 July Dark Horse added a second night, on 19 September.

The two are old friends. During the pandemic Harrison asked Godrich for advice on what became his 2023 album Innerstanding, and Godrich invited him to his studio in Brixton, where they built songs from tape loops, fast and with no plan. Harrison sang and played guitar and let Godrich steer. He's a machine. He has strong opinions about what he wants to hear, and for me it's very humbling.²

Dragonflies, tracklist

The instrument is the museum's Thomas Appleton pipe organ, built in 1830, which the Met bills as a way back to the sounds the building's earlier visitors would have heard.

The historian and broadcaster Janina Ramirez, the festival's president, talks with the two of them about their bands and the music of the 1990s, and then Selway and Utley play a live set together.

Paddy O'Connell, the podcast's host, asked the questions after a screening of the Blue Morpho short film. O'Brien described the depression that hit him in London during the second lockdown, his dark night of the soul, as his body telling him to stop. He first went to Mid Wales, where he now lives, 12 years ago.

He believes creativity depends on a framework. Radiohead's working day used to start at 11. His sessions with Paul Epworth and Riley MacIntyre began each morning with a barefoot walk to the river, a dip and a hot shower, then work at 11. A microphone was set up outdoors for the birdsong.

He has run side-by-side and blindfold tests on 432 Hz tuning, and it feels whole to him, though I could be barking up the wrong tree with 432.¹ His advice to the room was to walk barefoot, even in mud.

Yorke announced the playbacks on Bluesky on Wednesday, and CDJournal and Billboard JAPAN count 28 venues. In Sheep's Clothing, a hi-fi bar in West Hollywood, held its session last night. Tonight Sona, a listening room in Condesa, Mexico City, gives it 90 minutes, with phones locked away and no talking. Milan and Tokyo follow on Tuesday.

As Glide Magazine recalls in its anniversary piece, Yorke made the record in the break after Radiohead finished touring Hail to the Thief in 2004, encouraged by the band and by Nigel Godrich. Glide adds that the songs began as instrumentals and the vocals came once Godrich was involved. The album was nominated for the Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album, and two of its songs found their way into films: “Analyse” into The Prestige, “Black Swan” over the end credits of A Scanner Darkly.

Yorke marked the day itself with a video of Atoms for Peace playing live on From the Basement, captioned as 20 years of The Eraser.

Playbacks named in the coverage

The first time was after the band finished recording A Moon Shaped Pool; he doesn't date the second. The band were worn out, he felt it had come to a natural end, and he told the others he would not tour the record. They asked him to do it out of respect for what the five of them had, and he did, though that period was too much for him. By then Radiohead had become an unwieldy undertaking, with a lot of people around it who depended on the band.

He rates last year's 20 nights in Madrid, Bologna, London, Copenhagen and Berlin above every other tour. For me it was the most beautiful Radiohead tour so far, which, given more than thirty years of touring with this band, may mean something¹, he says, and he puts it down to the love, respect and gratitude among the five. Radiohead had not played since Philadelphia in August 2018, and he never really grasped how good the songs are until he had gone about seven years without playing them. Meeting Thom Yorke, Phil Selway and Colin and Jonny Greenwood at 17 was a kind of lifeline.

Pfnür asks him about the plan he gave Rolling Stone in March, about 20 concerts a year on other continents from 2027. O'Brien says there is no fixed master plan. It depends on how the five of them feel, and if it isn't right, they may not play live again for a while.

He also talks about a serious personal crisis that began in the second lockdown, in London in the winter of 2020, and lasted most of 2021. He was not suicidal, he says, and came through it without therapy or medication, with cold morning showers, meditation and breathing, music in his home studio and walks in the woods. Much of Blue Morpho came out of mornings alone in that small studio, and it carries his own name rather than EOB because he no longer wants to hide behind an alias.