Rai 5 shows its Radiohead documentary for a third time

Rai 5, the culture channel of Italy's public broadcaster, shows Benjamin Clavel's Radiohead. Soundtrack for a Revolution at 23:15 on Saturday 23 August, ten days after the surprise release of Hail to the Thief: Live Recordings 2003-2009. It is the film's third late-night airing this year, after May and July, and as before it goes on RaiPlay afterwards.

The film is Clavel's 2019 French documentary Le Monde selon Radiohead (The World According to Radiohead), which runs 53 minutes on RaiPlay. Arte broadcast it that November.

Clavel follows the band from the pop-grunge of Pablo Honey to the orchestral arrangements of A Moon Shaped Pool, but reads the records against their times instead of retelling the biography: OK Computer and its unease with technology, Kid A as a satire of Tony Blair's Britain, Hail to the Thief as an attack on George W. Bush. He has said he had no wish to make one more music documentary about the band, and wanted to show the themes that run through their work and still matter. He interviews a biographer, a philosopher and the composer Steve Reich. Among the pairings he cuts together, a crowded New York subway carriage plays against “Fitter Happier”, and Kurt Cobain's rage against Thom Yorke's.

Showings on Rai 5, 2025