Radiohead's engineers explain the 2025 in-the-round show

Radiohead played their 2025 tour without guitar cables, after the crew took a wireless system into Jonny Greenwood's studio and ran blind tests against the band's own leads. Simon Hodge, their front-of-house engineer, tells the story in a press release this week from Sound Devices, the company that makes the system, Astral. The band had tried radio for guitars before and always found it worse than a cable. Astral's guitar pack can mimic the electrical load of a jack lead, and Hodge says even the most cynical guitar techs were impressed and could hear no change.

For the first time, all 32 of Ed O'Brien's guitars on the run could be switched from one interface, through a control system Hodge built with the RF technician Matt Hayes. The release adds that the band use no backing tracks or autotune. The band is very invested in the experience being as real as possible without any ‘fixes’ or gimmicks⁵.

The rest of the show's workings came out in January, a few weeks after the tour of 20 arena shows ended in Copenhagen on 16 December. On 13 January the band posted “Europe 2025 production” on Dead Air Space, their blog, paying their respects to the touring crew and joking that most of what followed might need a tech translation device. It linked to TPi's production profile, which calls the tour Radiohead's first in-the-round production.

Britannia Row supplied the sound. The L-Acoustics system hung in the middle of each arena, where a scoreboard usually goes, with all the subwoofers in one block directly over the band, and their cardioid design cancelled the low end on the stage beneath. The whole rig could be flown or taken down in about an hour. Hodge had worked with Thom Yorke before but was mixing Radiohead live for the first time. While the creative and visual design is extremely important, with Radiohead, audio is their number one priority - a wonderful luxury for us.¹ Daniel Scheiman mixed the band's monitors from backstage for the whole run, something he had never done before, following the stage through talkback and camera feeds.

Sean Evans, who directed the KID A MNESIA exhibition, drew the design in February 2025 and was the tour's creative lead. Universal Pixels hung a ring of 12 LED screens around the stage like a halo, each able to rise, fall and turn on its own, so the ring took a new shape for every song. About 28 remote cameras inside the stage footprint fed them, two running on curved tracks. There was no timecode and no pre-rendered video. Every image was generated live and every cue fired by hand, from more than 70 songs programmed before rehearsals so that any of them could be called up at once.