In 1985, at an all-boys school in a small Oxfordshire town, five teenagers started rehearsing together on Fridays. They called themselves On a Friday, because that was when the music room was free. The headmaster, who was not a fan, once charged them for using a rehearsal room on a Sunday. Forty years later, they are one of the most important bands in the history of recorded music, with nine studio albums, six Grammy Awards, a place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and a 2025 European tour that broke the O2 Arena's attendance record. This is the story of Radiohead.
Berets, catsuits and Joy Division records
Abingdon School sits on the edge of a quiet market town about six miles south of Oxford. It has been there since the twelfth century. It is not the kind of place you would expect to produce a band that would reinvent rock music twice before the millennium.
Thom Yorke arrived in 1981, aged twelve. He had already lost the sight in his left eye as a child, the result of a series of operations to correct a paralysed eyelid that left it permanently half-shut. He was small, wiry, self-conscious, and furious about most things. Colin Greenwood was in the same year. Ed O'Brien and Phil Selway were the year above. Colin's younger brother Jonny was two years below.
Thom and Colin found each other at parties. Yorke later described their early friendship with characteristic understatement: "We always ended up at the same parties. He'd be wearing a beret and a catsuit, or something pretty fucking weird, and I'd be in a frilly blouse and crushed velvet dinner suit, and we'd pass round the Joy Division records." They had their first musical project together, a punky outfit called TNT, before On a Friday took shape.
The school's music teacher, Terence Gilmore-James, turned out to be quietly important. He gave Thom and Colin classical guitar lessons, but he also introduced them to jazz, film scores, postwar avant-garde music and twentieth-century classical composers. For a bunch of teenagers raised on R.E.M., The Smiths and U2, it was a door to a much wider world. You can hear Gilmore-James's fingerprints decades later in Jonny Greenwood's orchestral arrangements and the restless genre-hopping that would define the band's career.
Jonny was the last to join On a Friday, and initially not as a full member. He was two years younger, Colin's kid brother, and his first role was playing harmonica at rehearsals, apparently having to ask nicely for permission to sit in. He had been in another school band called Illiterate Hands, alongside Thom's brother Andy Yorke. Nobody at Abingdon School in 1987 would have guessed that within a decade, Jonny Greenwood would be widely considered one of the most inventive guitarists in the world.
The band played their first gig at the Jericho Tavern in Oxford. Modelling themselves on early heroes Talking Heads, they added a brass section, including two saxophone-playing sisters, to fill out the sound. Their early demo tapes, recorded at the school, featured tracks with titles like "Fragile Friend," "Mr. Celibate" and "Fat Girl." A later demo tape featuring three previously unheard tracks sold at auction for £2,000.
By 1987, everyone except Jonny had left Abingdon for university. Yorke went to Exeter, where he read English and art, played in a techno group called Flickernoise, and performed with a band called Headless Chickens. At Exeter, he met Stanley Donwood, who would design every piece of Radiohead artwork from 1994 onwards. Colin went to Cambridge, where he read English at Peterhouse and served as the college entertainment officer, which conveniently let him arrange gigs for On a Friday. On a Friday didn't split up. They just rehearsed during weekends and holidays, waiting for everyone to finish their degrees.
You should sign my band
In 1991, the members of On a Friday regrouped in Oxford, sharing a house on the corner of Magdalen Road and Ridgefield Road. They recorded a demo tape called the Manic Hedgehog, named after a local record shop, at Courtyard Studios. The studio's co-owner, Chris Hufford, was also the producer for Slowdive. He attended an On a Friday gig at the Jericho Tavern, liked what he heard, and he and his partner Bryce Edge became the band's managers. They still are, over three decades later.
Then Colin Greenwood did something that changed everything. He was working behind the counter at Our Price, the chain record shop, when an EMI sales representative called Keith Wozencroft walked in. Wozencroft was about to move into an A&R role at Parlophone. Colin looked at him and said, simply: "You should sign my band." He handed over the Manic Hedgehog demo.
Wozencroft listened to it on the drive back to London. He came back to Oxford to see them play. In November 1991, On a Friday performed at the Jericho Tavern to an audience that included several A&R scouts. It was only their eighth gig. On 21 December 1991, they signed a six-album recording contract with EMI.
There was one condition. The name had to go. On a Friday sounded, as someone at the label put it, like a pub covers band. The band found a replacement in a deep cut from their heroes Talking Heads: a Tex-Mex, accordion-driven song called "Radio Head" from the 1986 album True Stories. They took the name, closed the gap, and Radiohead were born.
Creep, and the problem with success
Pablo Honey was recorded in three weeks at Chipping Norton Recording Studios in Oxfordshire, with American producers Sean Slade and Paul Q. Kolderie. It was 1992, the band had virtually no studio experience, and the sessions were rocky. But within them was a song that would upend their lives.
"Creep" started quietly. Released as a single in September 1992, it reached number 78 on the UK chart, selling just 6,000 copies. BBC Radio 1 found it "too depressing" and pulled it from the playlist after playing it twice. Then, gradually, American college radio picked it up. By the time Pablo Honey came out in February 1993, "Creep" was in heavy rotation across the Atlantic. By autumn, the concentric rings of its impact had radiated across Europe, the Middle East, and back to the UK, where it was reissued and climbed to number seven. Radiohead performed it on Top of the Pops and as the first musical guests on Conan O'Brien's new talk show.
The comparisons came fast. "Creep" was praised as a generational anthem alongside Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and Beck's "Loser." The single probably saved the band from being dropped by EMI. But Yorke hated it almost immediately. He told Rolling Stone in 1993: "It's like it's not our song any more. It feels like we're doing a cover." He grew to despise the whole promotional circus. He drank heavily, became too drunk to perform on more than one occasion, and later admitted: "I hit the self-destruct button pretty quickly. When I got back to Oxford I was unbearable."
The band turned down an offer to tour the US supporting Duran Duran. Their managers felt they would earn more credibility supporting Belly instead. They also opened for PJ Harvey in New York and Los Angeles. It was the right instinct, but the one-hit-wonder label was already forming.
The Bends, and the slow burn
Making The Bends nearly broke them. The sessions at RAK Studios in London dragged on. Radiohead made six promotional trips to America. The Bends stalled at number 88 on the US album chart, which remains their lowest American showing. The constant flying gave Yorke a build-up of fluid in his ears, and he worried he was going deaf. At a show in Boston, he snapped, lashing out at moshers in the crowd, yelling and hitting one with his guitar. On 29 May, he begged the tour manager to book him a flight home.
But the album was quietly extraordinary. "Fake Plastic Trees," "High and Dry," "Just," and "Street Spirit (Fade Out)" would all become staples. In the UK, where Britpop was dominating everything, Radiohead were treated as outsiders, too earnest and melancholic for a scene built on lad culture and Union Jacks. But the audience grew. "Street Spirit" gave them their first UK top five hit.
Two things happened during this period that would shape the band's future. First, they toured America in support of R.E.M., one of their formative heroes. Michael Stipe became a genuine friend and advocate. When Yorke was struggling with the relentless stress of touring, Stipe gave him a piece of advice that would later become a Radiohead lyric: repeat to yourself, "I'm not here, this isn't happening." The line ended up in "How to Disappear Completely" on Kid A.
Second, the band recorded a song called "Lucky" in five hours for the War Child charity compilation The Help Album. Their producer was a young engineer called Nigel Godrich, who had assisted on The Bends. The session felt electric. Godrich would go on to produce every Radiohead album from OK Computer onwards. Yorke said "Lucky" shaped the sound and mood of what came next.
And then there was Jeff Buckley. The Bends producer John Leckie recalled the profound effect that seeing Buckley perform had on Thom Yorke. As Leckie put it, Buckley made Yorke realise "you could sing in a falsetto without sounding drippy." Listen to any Radiohead record from OK Computer onwards. You can hear it.
A haunted house in Bath
In early 1996, Radiohead started working on their third album in a converted apple-storage shed near Didcot called Canned Applause. It didn't have a toilet. It didn't have a kitchen. Yorke said the proximity to home made it impossible to concentrate. They got four songs done and decided they needed to go somewhere else.
That somewhere was St Catherine's Court, a fifteenth-century mansion near Bath owned by the actress Jane Seymour. It was unoccupied but occasionally used for corporate functions. The Cure had recorded Wild Mood Swings there. New Order would later use it too. Radiohead set up the control room in the library, which had views over the gardens, and the main recording space in the ballroom.
The isolation changed everything. There were no deadlines, no label executives, no schedule. Colin Greenwood later described sitting at the open windows on warm evenings with pieces of music spreading out before them. "Let Down" was recorded in the ballroom at three in the morning. The vocals for "Exit Music (For a Film)" were tracked halfway up a stone staircase, the natural reverb of the ancient walls giving Yorke's voice its spectral, echoey quality.
Yorke was convinced the house was haunted. He said ghosts talked to him in his sleep. One morning, after a night of hearing voices, he got up and decided he had to cut his hair. He had nothing to hand except the scissors on a penknife. He cut himself several times. It got messy. He came downstairs and everyone stared. Phil Selway gently took him aside and shaved it all off.
The album's working title was "Zeroes and Ones." A B-side called "Palo Alto" was originally titled "OK Computer" before its name migrated to the album. Meanwhile, the band had bought their plate reverb unit from Jona Lewie, the Stiff Records artist best known for "You'll Always Find Me in the Kitchen at Parties." They took a break from recording to tour America as the opening act for Alanis Morissette. Colin Greenwood later described it with affectionate horror: "Paranoid Android" had a ten-minute Hammond organ solo at the end that Jonny would refuse to stop playing. "There'd be little children crying at the end, begging their parents to take them home."
"I was basically catatonic. The claustrophobia, just having no sense of reality at all."
EMI were nervous. They thought OK Computer was uncommercial, difficult, impossible to market. It went to number one in the UK on release in June 1997, was certified five times platinum, sold over 4.5 million copies worldwide, and won Best Alternative Music Album at the Grammys. "Paranoid Android" and "Karma Police" became the two highest-charting Radiohead singles to date. In 2014, it was added to the US Library of Congress National Recording Registry as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."
It changed everything. Not just for Radiohead, but for British rock music. The Britpop bubble was bursting, and OK Computer initiated a shift towards something more atmospheric, more anxious, more electronic. An entire generation of bands, from Muse to Coldplay to Travis, would spend the next decade trying to build in its shadow. Radiohead had made, as one writer later put it, "the perfect rock album."
Their response was to refuse to make another one.
Everything falls apart
After the OK Computer tour ended, Thom Yorke fell apart. He described himself, without exaggeration, as "a complete fucking mess, completely unhinged." Before a large show in Ireland, he had recurring nightmares about floating down Dublin's river Liffey pursued by a giant tidal wave. He developed an inner monologue that criticised everything he did. Every time he picked up a guitar, he froze.
"I always used to use music as a way of moving on and dealing with things," he told the Guardian, "and I sort of felt like that the thing that helped me deal with things had been sold to the highest bidder and I was simply doing its bidding. And I couldn't handle that."
New bands were imitating Radiohead's sound, and Yorke experienced it as a kind of theft. He called it "fridge buzz," a constant background noise that made his own music feel meaningless. He stopped listening to rock entirely. Instead, he immersed himself in the electronic music coming out of the Warp label: Aphex Twin, Autechre, Boards of Canada. He later credited Aphex Twin as his biggest influence during this period, saying: "Aphex opened up another world that didn't involve my fucking electric guitar."
Yorke bought a house in Cornwall and spent months walking the cliffs and drawing, barely touching a musical instrument. When he finally sat down at the grand piano he had recently bought, something came. "Everything in Its Right Place" was the first song he wrote for Kid A. He played the riff over and over, "trying to meditate my way out of it." Jonny Greenwood later said they knew immediately it had to be the opening track. "Everything just followed after it."
The rest of the band were not entirely on board. Ed O'Brien had hoped the fourth album would be short, melodic guitar songs. Yorke shut that down: "There was no chance of the album sounding like that. I'd completely had it with melody. I just wanted rhythm. All melodies to me were pure embarrassment." Colin Greenwood found Yorke's new Warp influences "really cold." Band members considered leaving.
The recording sessions, which took place in Paris, Copenhagen, Gloucestershire and Oxford between January 1999 and April 2000, produced over forty songs. For at least some of the lyrics, Yorke adopted a technique borrowed from the Dada poet Tristan Tzara: he cut up words and phrases and drew them from a hat. The band considered calling the album No Logo, after Naomi Klein's anti-globalisation book, which they were all reading. The title they settled on, Kid A, came from a filename on one of Yorke's sequencers.
Among the lesser-known details: the bass on "The National Anthem" was actually played by Thom Yorke, not Colin Greenwood. "Idioteque" was built from a fifty-minute recording that Jonny Greenwood created with a modular synthesiser and gave to Yorke, who found a forty-second section in the middle that he described as "absolute genius" and built the entire song around it. Colin Greenwood's bassline for "Dollars and Cents" originated from playing over an Alice Coltrane record he particularly liked.
Radiohead released no singles from Kid A. They did no photoshoots. They gave almost no interviews. Instead, they released short animations online and toured Europe in 2000 in a custom-built tent without corporate sponsors. The reaction was split. Melody Maker gave it 2 out of 10. Nick Hornby called it "commercial suicide." NME hedged with a cautious 7 out of 10, calling it the work of a band "scared to commit emotionally." Multiple publications later named it the best album of the decade. It debuted at number one in both the UK and the US and has since been recognised as one of the boldest creative pivots in the history of popular music.
Amnesiac, recorded in the same sessions and released eight months later, extended the experiment. Then Hail to the Thief in 2003 blended rock and electronics with lyrics about the war on terror. It was the last album Radiohead made for EMI, completing the six-album deal that had started with Colin handing a demo tape to a man in a record shop.
Pay what you want
In 2006, the New York Times described Radiohead as "by far the world's most popular unsigned band." After the EMI contract expired, they were free agents. What they did next changed the music industry.
On 10 October 2007, Radiohead released In Rainbows on their website as a digital download. The price: whatever you wanted to pay, including nothing. It was the first time a major act had done this. An estimated 1.2 million people downloaded it on the first day. Research later suggested 62% of downloaders paid nothing, with the global average around $2.26. Radiohead dismissed the research as "wholly inaccurate," but in December, Yorke confirmed the experiment had been a success: In Rainbows made more money from digital sales than all their previous albums' digital sales combined.
A special "discbox" edition followed: vinyl, CDs, a second disc of session material, and a hardcover art book. When the album was released physically through XL Recordings, it went to number one in both the UK and the US. It won two Grammys and was the best-selling vinyl record of 2008. Colin Greenwood explained the strategy simply: they wanted to avoid "regulated playlists and straitened formats," to make sure fans everywhere heard the music at the same time, and to stop it leaking before release. In other words, they did it because it made sense, not because it was a manifesto.
The King of Limbs followed in 2011, an exploration of rhythm built on extensive looping and sampling. Then A Moon Shaped Pool in 2016, which prominently featured Jonny Greenwood's orchestral arrangements and finally included a studio recording of "True Love Waits," a song the band had first performed live in 1995 and spent twenty-one years trying to get right. That same year, Radiohead's back catalogue was transferred from the EMI reissues, which had been released without the band's consent, to XL Recordings, who reissued the full discography on vinyl.
The seven-year silence
After touring A Moon Shaped Pool through 2016, 2017 and 2018, including headline sets at Glastonbury and Coachella, Radiohead went quiet. The members worked on solo projects. Yorke and Jonny Greenwood formed The Smile with drummer Tom Skinner and released three albums. Colin Greenwood joined Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds on tour and on the album Wild God. Phil Selway released solo records. Ed O'Brien put out a debut album under his own name.
In September 2024, Colin Greenwood said the band had recently reconvened to rehearse. In October, Yorke addressed the speculation with characteristic opacity: they had "earned the right to do what makes sense to us without having to explain ourselves or be answerable to anyone else's historical idea of what we should be doing."
On 3 September 2025, Radiohead announced a 20-date European tour. Phil Selway wrote: "After a seven-year pause, it felt really good to play the songs again and reconnect with a musical identity that has become lodged deep inside all five of us."
The tour opened in Madrid on 4 November 2025. They played in the round, with LED screens suspended above the stage, and a different setlist every night drawn from over sixty-five rehearsed songs. Their final London show at the O2 Arena drew 22,355 people, a new venue attendance record. All ticket sales outside the UK included a donation to Medecins Sans Frontieres, which Radiohead matched. In Copenhagen, after Yorke was forced to postpone two shows due to an extreme throat infection, fans gathered in a pub and sang "Let Down" together until the band confirmed they were coming back.
On 16 December 2025, Radiohead played the last date of their European tour in Copenhagen. The encore ended, as it often did, with "Karma Police." The entire arena sang along. When asked afterwards whether there would be new Radiohead songs, Jonny Greenwood said: "I don't know." Yorke added: "We haven't thought past the tour."
The vinyl collection
Radiohead on vinyl is a collector's world of its own. The XL Recordings reissues of the back catalogue, released in 2016, are the definitive pressings for most of the discography. The original UK Parlophone pressings of Pablo Honey through Hail to the Thief are sought after but variable in quality. OK Computer's 2017 remaster, OKNOTOK 1997 2017, included three unreleased tracks and came in a deluxe vinyl edition with a hardcover art book, cassette tape of session material, and companion artwork by Donwood and Yorke. In Rainbows' discbox edition, with its vinyl pressing, remains a collector's item. Kid A Mnesia, the 2021 triple album reissue combining Kid A and Amnesiac with a disc of unreleased material, is one of the more comprehensive vinyl packages any band has put out.
For anyone starting a Radiohead vinyl collection, the XL reissues are the sensible entry point: widely available, well-pressed, and faithful to the original masters. For completists, the rabbit hole goes deep: limited-edition coloured pressings, Japanese releases with bonus tracks, and the various configurations of In Rainbows and OKNOTOK can keep you hunting for years.
From five schoolmates in an Oxfordshire music room to one of the most acclaimed catalogues in rock, the thread that runs through Radiohead's story is the refusal to repeat themselves. Every time they found a formula that worked, they abandoned it. Every time the world caught up, they moved on. It is the most consistently interesting career in modern music, and on vinyl, across nine albums, you can hear every turn.