Radiohead play their first show in seven years in Madrid

Radiohead played their first concert since August 2018 at the Movistar Arena in Madrid on Tuesday 4 November, opening a 20-night European tour with “Let Down” and closing two hours later with “Karma Police”. For “There There”, in the encore, Jonny Greenwood and Ed O'Brien each sat down at a drum kit of their own, so that four men were drumming at once: Phil Selway, the new second drummer Chris Vatalaro and the two guitarists.

The band played in the round, on a stage in the middle of the arena floor, inside a ring of semi-transparent screens that carried live footage of them. For the first few songs they could barely be seen. The screens began to lift during “Bloom”, rose and fell through the main set, and went all the way up only for the encore. Before the tour the band told The Sunday Times they had not played in the round since opening for Ned's Atomic Dustbin in 1993.

Thom Yorke, O'Brien and Jonny and Colin Greenwood stood spaced around the edge of the stage, with Selway and Vatalaro in the middle. Vatalaro, an American based in London who has played with Imogen Heap, Anohni and the Johnsons and Jarvis Cocker, takes the place of Portishead's Clive Deamer, and it was Selway who recommended him to the others. At Selway's NPR Tiny Desk concert in 2023 he introduced Vatalaro by saying There is absolutely no way I am playing drums in front of Chris, ever.²¹

The set ran to 25 songs, with six each from Hail to the Thief and OK Computer and something from every studio album except Pablo Honey, so there was no “Creep”. “Sit Down. Stand Up.” was played for the first time since 2004 and “Subterranean Homesick Alien” for the first time since 2017.

Yorke said almost nothing: a “gracias” or two, and, as he picked up an acoustic guitar for “Fake Plastic Trees” at the start of the encore, Fair enough.¹⁴ Rolling Stone says the crowd sang that one back with phone lights held up.

The day before, Dead Air Space, the band's blog, posted for the first time since 2019, a group portrait of the five by Alex Lake titled “Twenty-five years later......” and nothing else.

The four Madrid nights sold 68,737 tickets between them. Les Inrocks found three generations in the arena, from a French boy of about 15 who found the band through In Rainbows and learned it on the piano to an American father who had brought his children more than 5,500 km. The Guardian says its journalists were refused tickets to review the show after it reported a Palestinian campaign's call to boycott the tour; the band did not comment, and photo agencies were kept out.

Pitchfork saw the five gather at one side of the stage for “Karma Police” at the end of the night, and Rockdelux reports that as the crowd filed out, articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights were projected while The Fall's “Oh! Brother” played.

Setlist, Movistar Arena, Madrid, 4 November 2025