The band · timeline
Timeline
Where the band changed direction, against every album, 1985 to now.
On a Friday forms at Abingdon School
Friday was their rehearsal day in the school's music room, and the name came from it. The headmaster once charged them for using a rehearsal room on a Sunday.
EMI signs the band, and they become Radiohead
Colin Greenwood met Keith Wozencroft of EMI in a record shop and gave him their demo. They signed on 21 December, and at EMI's request took a new name from “Radio Head”, a Talking Heads song.
“Creep” becomes a hit abroad first
It did little in Britain at first. Israeli radio took it up after the DJ Yoav Kutner started playing it, and so did American alternative radio; reissued at home in September 1993, it reached number seven.
Stanley Donwood starts making Radiohead artwork
The two had met as art students at Exeter, and Yorke asked him to help with the sleeve of the My Iron Lung EP. They have made every Radiohead sleeve together since.
Nigel Godrich moves from engineer to producer
John Leckie brought him in to engineer The Bends, and the band nicknamed him “Nihilist”. He co-produced OK Computer and has produced every Radiohead album since.
The first radiohead.com: one line of text
The earliest captured radiohead.com is a white page of monospaced text with one line on it: “This is the Radiohead internet site.”
OK Computer-era web art and the “Shopocalypse Channel”
The band's later note says it was made at St Catherine's in Somerset during the OK Computer sessions, from an armchair in a corner of the old library. It ran on low-bandwidth HTML and GIFs, with cryptic anti-consumerist writing over them, and its front page was titled “Shopocalypse Channel”.
Meeting People Is Easy follows the OK Computer tour
Grant Gee filmed the OK Computer tour from Barcelona in May 1997, and the round of interviews that came with it. The film premiered at the London Film Festival in November 1998.
Ed's diary appears inside the official site
Ed O'Brien wrote it from July 1999 to June 2000, while Kid A and Amnesiac were being recorded, and it went up as pages of images and text. This site has mirrored it since the 2000s.
Kid A released with no singles and few interviews
In place of singles and videos there were “blips”, dozens of 10-second animations of Stanley Donwood's artwork, shown on music channels and passed around online.
The Kid A tour plays in a tent of its own, with no sponsors
Radiohead toured Europe in a tent built for the tour, with no sponsors on it.
The modified bear takes over the site
The bear turned up all over the Kid A and Amnesiac pages, where it could be clicked, and had pages to itself, blinkingbears and modbear among them.
The Amnesiac web maze
The black Amnesiac site set the album's imagery among links to Friends of the Earth and Indymedia, scraps of diary and something called Fred's Nightmare.
Radiohead's EMI contract ends
Hail to the Thief was the sixth album of the six-album deal they had signed in 1991. Radiohead did not renew it.
The band archive their own old websites
A page headed “Hypertextual Archaeology” linked Site1 to Site9, “left to wither on the line”, with a line or two on each. The note on the last, made in a hurry before Hail to the Thief, admits it went up with nothing in it.
Dead Air Space opens as the band's own blog
The band's blog carried notes from the studio and pictures, their politics and their announcements.
In Rainbows sold from the band's own site
Jonny Greenwood announced it on the band's blog on 1 October 2007, 10 days before the download. Buyers named their own price, and a discbox with a second CD of eight more songs sold alongside it.
The band broadcast their own web shows
Around In Rainbows the band ran their own broadcasts from the studio on radiohead.tv, among them Thumbs Down in November and Scotch Mist on New Year's Eve.
The “Nude” stems go on sale
Radiohead sold the five separate parts of “Nude” on iTunes so that anyone could remix it, and the results were posted and ranked online.
“House of Cards” filmed with lidar
James Frost made the video with no cameras, only lidar and motion capture, and the data went up on Google Code under a Creative Commons licence.
Radiohead criticise EMI's “Best Of”
EMI put it out in June 2008, after the band had left the label and without their say. Thom Yorke called it “a wasted opportunity”.
Office charts on Dead Air Space
Each office chart was a list of what the band and the people around them had been listening to that week.
The Universal Sigh, a free newspaper
The 12-page tabloid was handed out free in cities around the world on 28 and 29 March 2011. Stanley Donwood gave away about 3,000 copies himself outside Rough Trade East.
The King of Limbs goes out as a download first
The download arrived on 18 February 2011, a day earlier than announced. The CD and vinyl followed on 28 March.
PolyFauna, the app
A phone app built from the music and imagery of The King of Limbs, made with Stanley Donwood, Nigel Godrich and the studio Universal Everything.
Radiohead delete their web presence
At the start of May 2016 radiohead.com went blank and the band's social media posts vanished. “Burn the Witch”, the first song from A Moon Shaped Pool, followed on 3 May.
OKNOTOK reissues OK Computer
OK Computer at 20, remastered with its B-sides and three songs never released before, “I Promise”, “Man of War” and “Lift”. It was the first reissue after the catalogue moved from EMI to XL.
MiniDiscs [Hacked] released after a leak and a ransom demand
More than 16 hours of Thom Yorke's OK Computer-era minidiscs leaked in June 2019, with reports of a ransom. The band put them on Bandcamp for 18 days and gave every penny to Extinction Rebellion.
Radiohead Public Library launches
The band put their videos, live films, artwork and old websites into one online archive in January 2020, Meeting People Is Easy among them.
The Kid A Mnesia Exhibition opens
A free digital exhibition of the Kid A and Amnesiac artwork and music, for PlayStation 5, Mac and Windows, made after plans for a real installation fell through. A physical one, the Motion Picture House, opened at Coachella in April 2026.
The Smile debuts
Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood and Tom Skinner, the Sons of Kemet drummer, played their first set as The Smile on Glastonbury's Live at Worthy Farm stream on 22 May 2021.
Radiohead return to the stage after seven years
Radiohead played four nights in each of five arenas, in the round, from Madrid on 4 November to Copenhagen on 16 December. Their last show before that was in Philadelphia on 1 August 2018.