Colin Greenwood asks the government to fix touring after Brexit

Colin Greenwood has written in The Guardian that touring Europe made Radiohead the band they are. Like Hamburg to the Beatles, Europe was crucial to our growth as a band.³ He asks the government to admit it did too little for the creative industries in the Brexit talks, and to renegotiate the terms for touring in Europe.

Radiohead were already in the row. On 9 January, after The Independent reported that Britain had turned down an EU offer letting performers work in member states for up to 90 days without a visa, Thom Yorke called the government Spineless⁴ on Twitter; the government said the EU had rejected a wider offer of its own. On 20 January the band were among about 110 signatories, with Elton John, Sting, Ed Sheeran and Liam Gallagher, of an open letter in The Times saying the government had shamefully failed British musicians, dancers, actors and their crews.

Greenwood goes back to the first club gig on the mainland, at Huset in Aarhus in June 1993, then small clubs and early festival slots in Sweden, the Netherlands and France, in an old bus that smelled of diesel. He remembers Spanish crowds clapping as one and counting down to the choruses, and Milan holding up its Nokias to record snippets. After a 1995 set at the little Café de la Danse in Paris, Françoise Hardy and Diana Ross both came and held court (Madame Ross to us³).

Now Adrian, Radiohead's touring accountant, has told him that a £10,000 guitar needs a carnet, a customs list of goods taken in and out of a country, at about £650 plus VAT. Before Brexit only Norway and Switzerland asked for one; Adrian expects Europe to be more like South America, each country with its own rules. Cabotage rules let a truck carrying a British band's gear make just two drops in the EU before it goes home, which rules out a tour of several cities with British trucks and buses.

He can pay the costs himself. His worry is for Radiohead's crew of nearly 30 years, many of them European; for British staging, sound and lighting firms bidding for European festivals; for a solo cellist whose carnet for a Berlin date would cost more than her fee of a couple of hundred euros; and for a young Viennese violinist now put off studying in Britain.

In December 2018 he played three sold-out nights with the Belgian singer Tamino at the Ancienne Belgique in Brussels, taking the Eurostar with his bass. No visas, no carnet, just the freedom of music.³ Unloading the van, he saw that the square outside had been named Place Jo Cox, after the murdered Labour MP.