The Story
Radiohead formed in Abingdon, Oxfordshire in 1985, when five schoolmates — Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood, Colin Greenwood, Ed O'Brien, and Philip Selway — began rehearsing under the name On a Friday. Signed to EMI in 1991, they took their new name from a Talking Heads song and broke worldwide a year later with 'Creep,' a song whose ubiquity they would spend the next decade outrunning.
They outran it definitively. 'The Bends' (1995) traded grunge for grandeur; 'OK Computer' (1997) became a generation's portrait of pre-millennium unease and is routinely named among the greatest albums ever made. Then, at the height of their rock acclaim, they dismantled the formula entirely: 'Kid A' (2000) swapped guitars for synthesizers, samplers, and ondes Martenot, and somehow topped charts on both sides of the Atlantic doing it.
The reinventions never stopped being structural. In 2007 they released 'In Rainbows' as a pay-what-you-want download — a move that upended music-industry economics and remains one of the most discussed release strategies in history. 'A Moon Shaped Pool' (2016) distilled the band's orchestral instincts, with Jonny Greenwood's film-score work audibly in its DNA. They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2019.
After seven years away from the stage, Radiohead returned in November 2025 with twenty arena shows across Madrid, Bologna, London, Copenhagen, and Berlin — played in the round, drawing from their whole catalog, and treating no two nights the same. The band has said it intends to keep playing roughly twenty concerts a year, on rotating continents, on its own terms — which is about as Radiohead as touring plans get.
