Four Abingdon School pupils form On a Friday, named for their rehearsal day

Thom Yorke, Colin Greenwood, Ed O'Brien and Philip Selway, pupils at Abingdon School, a private boys' school just outside Oxford, have started a band and called it On a Friday, after the one day of the week they rehearse.

Yorke and Colin Greenwood are classmates, brought together by Joy Division and Magazine, Record Collector wrote in its 1996 history of the band. Yorke had been in a sixth-form punk band, TNT, and when he left it Colin took his place. Selway, an older boy, turned out to play the drums, and O'Brien, another senior pupil, brought a guitar. Colin's younger brother Jonny, who plays viola in the Thames Valley Youth Orchestra, was the last one in, and was handed the only job left, the harmonica.

The room to play comes from the school's music department, run by Terence Gilmore-James, who plays his pupils twentieth-century classical music, jazz and film scores. The headmaster is less generous, and once sent the band a bill for practising in a music room on a Sunday, as Colin Greenwood told Alex Ross of The New Yorker.