Radiohead voted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

Radiohead have been voted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The Hall named its class of 2019 on Thursday 13 December: The Cure, Def Leppard, Janet Jackson, Stevie Nicks, Radiohead, Roxy Music and The Zombies.

The band thanks the Hall of Fame voting body and extends congratulations to this year’s fellow inductees.

Radiohead¹

That sentence, put out on the band's behalf, is all they have said. An act becomes eligible 25 years after its first record. Radiohead's came out in 1992, and they were on the ballot last year, their first eligible year, without getting in before being nominated again in October.

The ceremony is on Friday 29 March at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, with an edited broadcast on HBO. Last time round the band made it plain they would not be at the one in Cleveland, which fell on 14 April this year, the night they played Tecnópolis near Buenos Aires.

The public vote was cooler. Radiohead came tenth of the 15 in it, with Def Leppard on top; its 3.3 million votes count as a single ballot beside the more than 1,000 cast by artists, living inductees, historians and industry figures.

When Rolling Stone asked the band about the Hall in June 2017, backstage at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley, only one of the five sounded keen. Ed O'Brien would rather be at home by the fire, or at a gig, and Thom Yorke declined to answer in case he put his foot in it. Jonny Greenwood thought the music business was self-regarding enough already.

I don’t care. Maybe it’s a cultural thing that I really don’t understand.

Jonny Greenwood¹⁴

Colin Greenwood said he would be grateful to get in, and pictured himself at the ceremony on his own.

It might be me just doing bass versions of everything like, ‘Come on, you know this one!’ I’d have to play the bass part to ‘Creep’ five times.

Colin Greenwood¹⁴