The story of Radiohead

Five boys from Abingdon

Radiohead's story starts at Abingdon School, a private school for boys just south of Oxford. Thom Yorke was born in Wellingborough in October 1968 with a paralysed left eye, and after a childhood of moving around Scotland and England he felt out of place there, getting into fights and hiding out in the music and art rooms. He had wanted to be a rock star ever since he saw Brian May of Queen on television at the age of eight. Colin Greenwood was in his year, Ed O'Brien was a year above, and the drummer Philip Selway was a year above Ed. Thom met Ed when he wrote the music for a school production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, with Ed playing Lysander, and asked him to come and jam.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 1985 the boys became a band called On a Friday, named after the one day they were allowed to rehearse in the school's music room. They credited their music teacher with opening their ears to jazz, film scores and modern classical music, although he later remembered young Thom as a thinker and an experimenter rather than a great musician. The last to join was Colin's little brother Jonny, three school years below. He started on harmonica and keyboards, but the band had just fired a keyboard player for being too loud, so Jonny spent his first months playing with his keyboard switched off. Nobody noticed, and Thom even praised the interesting texture. Jonny quietly learned chords at home, turned the volume up bit by bit, and ended up as the lead guitarist.[1] [2] [3]

On a Friday played some of their first shows at the Jericho Tavern in Oxford. An early demo was good enough for Island Records to offer them a deal, but the band decided they were not ready and went off to university instead. Thom studied English and art at Exeter, where he played in a band called Headless Chickens and met two people who would shape his life, the artist Stanley Donwood and his future partner Rachel Owen. Colin read English at Cambridge, Ed studied economics at Manchester, and Phil studied English and history at Liverpool Polytechnic. For about four years the band barely played live, and only got together to rehearse in village halls during the holidays.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

In 1991 they regrouped in Oxford, sharing a house on the corner of Magdalen Road. A new demo reached Chris Hufford, who co-owned the local Courtyard Studios, and after seeing them at the Jericho Tavern he and his partner Bryce Edge became their managers, a partnership that has lasted for decades. Colin was working at the Our Price record shop in Oxford when an EMI sales rep called Keith Wozencroft mentioned he was moving into talent scouting at Parlophone, so Colin handed him a tape. By their eighth gig record companies were circling, and on the twenty first of December 1991 On a Friday signed a six album deal with EMI. The label wanted a new name, so they borrowed one from a Talking Heads song called Radio Head.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Creep and the curse of a hit

Radiohead's first EP, Drill, came out in May 1992 and sank. Their managers brought in two American producers, Paul Kolderie and Sean Slade, who had worked with the Pixies, and sessions began at Chipping Norton studios. The songs they were meant to record went nowhere. Between takes, the band played a song Thom had written at Exeter, joking that it was their Scott Walker song. The producers assumed it was a cover, and Slade remarked that it was a shame their best song was someone else's. When Kolderie finally asked them to play it, the band did not realise the tape was rolling, and the room broke into applause at the end. Jonny, who disliked the quiet ballad, attacked it with three violent blasts of guitar before the chorus. Ed later said that was Jonny trying to wreck the song, and it made it.[1] [2]

EMI released Creep on the twenty first of September 1992. BBC Radio 1 decided it was too depressing and left it off the playlist, and it crept to number seventy eight in the UK, selling around six thousand copies. The music press was often scathing. Rescue came from far away. In Israel the influential DJ Yoav Kutner played it again and again, it became a hit there, and in March 1993 Radiohead flew to Tel Aviv for their first show abroad. Radio stations in San Francisco and Los Angeles picked it up too. The debut album, Pablo Honey, arrived on the twenty second of February 1993 and reached number twenty two in Britain. Its title came from an American prank call comedy sketch by the Jerky Boys.[1] [2] [3] [4]

By the middle of 1993 Creep was everywhere in America, compared to Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana and Loser by Beck. It reached number two on the Billboard modern rock chart and number thirty four on the Hot 100. In September the band were the very first musical guests on Late Night with Conan O'Brien, and a nod from Beavis and Butt-Head on MTV helped too. EMI reissued the single at home, where it reached number seven. There was a catch. Ed had noticed during recording that the chords echoed The Air That I Breathe, the song made famous by the Hollies. After the publisher took legal action, its writers Albert Hammond and Mike Hazlewood were added as co-writers. Hammond said they accepted only a small share because the band had been honest about it.[1] [2] [3]

Radiohead spent the next two years on the road, playing Creep every single night. In America some fans would scream for it and then walk out once it was over. Ed said it felt like living the same four and a half minutes over and over, and Thom said it was like playing someone else's song. He later admitted he hit the self destruct button, drinking heavily and sometimes getting too drunk to perform. In 1993 he fell ill and the band pulled out of the Reading Festival, with Thom telling NME he was finished physically and mentally. They also came to regret a non album single, Pop Is Dead, whose video had Thom lying in a glass coffin. Still, Ed believed EMI would have dropped them without Creep, and its success bought them their freedom.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Bends

Even before Pablo Honey was finished, Thom was writing far better songs. When he played Paul Kolderie a demo of new material, the producer was shocked to find every track beat the debut. For album two the band chose John Leckie, who had produced Magazine, one of their heroes, and work began at RAK Studios in London in February 1994. EMI allowed nine weeks and wanted a single to beat Creep. It turned into a nightmare. Colin called it eight weeks of hell, Thom described two months of total meltdown, and their co-manager Chris Hufford considered quitting because of Thom's mistrust of everybody. The members even looked at ways out of their contracts. In the end recording stopped so they could go back on tour.[1] [2] [3]

The turning point came far from home. On a tour of Mexico, years of things left unsaid all came out in one day, and Thom later described the band spitting, fighting and crying at each other. Afterwards they went back to the album and it suddenly made sense. Another spark came from a Jeff Buckley concert in London, which gave Thom the confidence to sing in falsetto. Back at RAK he recorded Fake Plastic Trees alone on an acoustic guitar. According to Colin, he played three takes and then burst into tears. Thom thought the performance was too exposed to use, but his bandmates talked him round, and the rest of Radiohead built the finished song around it.[1] [2]

Two key people arrived during these sessions. The young house engineer at RAK was Nigel Godrich, and when John Leckie left for a social engagement one evening, Godrich and the band stayed behind to record B sides. One of them, Black Star, made it onto the album. Thom also asked his old Exeter friend Stanley Donwood to handle the artwork. For the cover of The Bends they tried to film an iron lung in an Oxford hospital, found it dull, and instead filmed a medical training mannequin and stretched the image. The EP My Iron Lung answered the Creep pressure head on, with a lyric about a new song that sounds just like the last one. The Bends was dedicated to the American comedian Bill Hicks.[1] [2] [3]

The Bends came out in the UK on the thirteenth of March 1995, at the height of Britpop, and at first it barely registered. It reached number four in Britain and only number eighty eight in America, but word of mouth kept it selling. Fake Plastic Trees turned up in the film Clueless, and R.E.M. took Radiohead on tour, with Michael Stipe offering Thom advice about fame. Before a show in Denver their tour van was stolen with their gear, so Thom and Jonny played an acoustic set on rented instruments. In January 1996 Street Spirit reached number five, beating Creep and proving they were no one hit wonder. The toll was physical too. Jonny damaged his hearing and wore a brace on his right arm for repetitive strain injury.[1] [2] [3] [4]

OK Computer

On the fourth of September 1995, Radiohead joined a charity project organised by Brian Eno for War Child, in which every song had to be recorded in a single day. With Nigel Godrich they cut a song called Lucky in about five hours, and Thom called it the first mark on the wall for the next album. They decided to produce it themselves with Godrich, and their label gave them around one hundred thousand pounds for equipment. They set up in a converted shed near Didcot, then broke off to open for Alanis Morissette in America, where a new song called Lift went down a storm. Baz Luhrmann also showed them the last half hour of his Romeo and Juliet film, and they wrote Exit Music for a Film for the end credits.[1] [2] [3]

The heart of OK Computer was recorded at St Catherine's Court, a centuries old mansion near Bath owned by the actress Jane Seymour. The band roamed its rooms. Thom sang Exit Music on a stone staircase for the natural echo, and Let Down was recorded in the ballroom at three in the morning. Ed reckoned eighty per cent of the album was played live. The songs drew on strange corners of life. Paranoid Android came after an ugly night in a Los Angeles bar and borrowed its name from a gloomy robot in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Fitter Happier was read by a computer voice called Fred from a Macintosh program. Climbing Up the Walls drew on Thom's earlier job as an orderly in a psychiatric hospital.[1] [2] [3]

When Radiohead delivered the album, their American label Capitol was alarmed. Phil remembered the phrase commercial suicide, and Capitol cut its sales forecast from two million to half a million. Parlophone in Britain stayed confident, taking newspaper and London Underground adverts filled with the words of Fitter Happier, while Capitol mailed critics cassette players with the album glued inside. The six and a half minute Paranoid Android became their highest charting UK single at number three. OK Computer came out in Britain on the sixteenth of June 1997, entered at number one, and went on to win a Grammy. Twelve days later the band headlined Glastonbury in the mud. Blinded by lights and with his monitors failing, Thom told Ed he was leaving. Ed persuaded him to stay, and it became one of the festival's legendary sets.[1] [2] [3]

The Against Demons world tour ran from May 1997 to April 1998, and it nearly broke them. Colin later described the hundred yard stare in Thom's eyes on stage and called it the lowest point of their career. The director Grant Gee followed them for the documentary Meeting People Is Easy, a bleak portrait of endless interviews and exhaustion. Gee also made the No Surprises video, a single shot of Thom inside a helmet slowly filling with water, and the song was sped up during filming so he would not have to hold his breath for so long. When it was over, Thom and Ed both slid into depression. Ed said he used a lot of drugs back in Oxford and was the lowest he had ever been, and the band came close to splitting up.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Kid A, Amnesiac and starting again

After OK Computer, Thom had a breakdown. He could not finish songs on guitar and felt that rock music had run its course. He even turned down an offer to score the film Fight Club because he was recovering from stress. He was also upset by new bands like Travis and Coldplay, feeling they had copied him, until Nigel Godrich pointed out that Thom had not invented men singing falsetto over acoustic guitars. To recover he bought a house in Cornwall, walked the cliffs, drew, and played only a grand piano. In the same week he wrote Everything in Its Right Place and Pyramid Song. At home he listened almost only to electronic artists on the Warp label, such as Aphex Twin and Autechre, and wanted his voice to become just another instrument.[1] [2] [3]

Recording began in Paris in January 1999 with no deadline, and quickly went adrift. Two weeks in Copenhagen produced about fifty reels of tape and not one finished song. At a mansion in Gloucestershire the meetings grew tense, and the band agreed they would split up if they could not agree on a record worth releasing. Jonny worried about pretentious art rock, Colin found the electronic influences cold, and Ed, a guitarist suddenly facing songs with no guitars, kept a public online diary of the struggle. The breakthrough was Everything in Its Right Place, rebuilt on a synthesiser, which taught them that not everybody had to play on every song. Jonny wrote a string part for How to Disappear Completely that made the orchestra burst out giggling, because it seemed impossible to play.[1] [2] [3]

Kid A came out in October 2000. There were no singles and no conventional videos, just short animated clips the band called blips, and it had already leaked on the file sharing service Napster. It went straight to number one in America anyway, the first British album to top the chart there since the Spice Girls in 1996. The name came from a file on one of Thom's sequencers, and he liked that it meant nothing. Radiohead toured Europe in a custom built tent with no advertising. Some British critics called the album a commercial suicide note and fans were split, but it won a Grammy, and by the end of the decade Rolling Stone, Pitchfork and The Times had all named it the best album of the 2000s.[1] [2]

Half of the songs from those sessions came out in May 2001 as Amnesiac, which the band insisted was a real album and not a pile of leftovers. For the closing song, Life in a Glasshouse, Jonny wrote to the veteran jazz trumpeter Humphrey Lyttelton admitting the band were a bit stuck. Lyttelton said yes after his daughter played him OK Computer, and his band played it like a New Orleans funeral march. Amnesiac's special edition, designed to look like a library book, won Thom and Stanley Donwood a Grammy. Pyramid Song became their first single since No Surprises. That summer's North American tour was so successful that The Observer called it the most sweeping conquest of America by a British group since Beatlemania.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Hail to the Thief, freedom and In Rainbows

For the next album Radiohead wanted speed. They road tested songs in Spain and Portugal in 2002, then recorded most of Hail to the Thief in about two weeks in Los Angeles. Thom's lyrics were shaped by the election of George W. Bush and the war on terror, and the title came from a chant used by anti Bush protesters. Ten weeks before release an unfinished version leaked online, which annoyed the band because fans were hearing songs that were not done. It still entered the UK chart at number one in June 2003. When they finally nailed There There back in Oxfordshire, Thom said he cried with relief. Around this time he became a spokesman for Friends of the Earth, and in 2006 he refused to meet Prime Minister Tony Blair, partly because of the Iraq war.[1] [2] [3]

Hail to the Thief was the last album on their EMI contract, and in 2006 The New York Times called them by far the world's most popular unsigned band. They took a long break. Jonny released his first film score, Bodysong, became composer in residence with the BBC Concert Orchestra, and in 2005 he and Phil appeared in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire as the wizard rock band the Weird Sisters, with Jarvis Cocker singing. In 2007 Jonny scored There Will Be Blood, the first of many films for Paul Thomas Anderson. Thom made his first solo album, The Eraser, in 2006, stressing it came with the band's blessing. In May 2006 Phil's mother died suddenly, and Radiohead cancelled a concert in Amsterdam.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Getting back to work was hard. Sessions began in 2005 without Nigel Godrich, and the band blamed their slow progress on the long break, the lack of a deadline, and the fact that all of them had now become fathers. A short spell with the producer Spike Stent did not work out, and their own management suggested they might call it a day. Ed believed this could be their last record and decided to pour everything into it. Touring in 2006 helped them finish the songs, and then Godrich came back and, in Thom's words, gave them a kick up the backside. They lived in caravans outside Tottenham House, a crumbling mansion in Wiltshire, played guitars borrowed from Johnny Marr, and Colin picked up temporary tinnitus from faulty headphones.[1] [2]

On the tenth of October 2007 Radiohead released In Rainbows as a download from their own website and let fans pay whatever they liked, including nothing at all. It was the first time a major act had done such a thing, and it made headlines around the world. Some musicians, including Lily Allen and Kim Gordon, said it made life harder for smaller bands. The physical album followed on XL Recordings and went to number one in both Britain and America. The single Nude, first attempted back in the OK Computer days, became their first American top forty hit since Creep. In what many saw as retaliation, EMI released a box set and, in 2008, a greatest hits album without the band's involvement. Thom called it a wasted opportunity.[1] [2] [3]

The King of Limbs, a tragedy and A Moon Shaped Pool

Radiohead grew more unpredictable. In 2009 they released a song for Harry Patch, the last surviving British soldier of the First World War, and in January 2010 they played a benefit in Los Angeles that raised more than half a million dollars for Oxfam's Haiti earthquake relief. Thom formed a side band, Atoms for Peace, with Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Nigel Godrich. On the eighteenth of February 2011 the band dropped The King of Limbs, an album built from loops and samples. The video for Lotus Flower, a black and white film of Thom dancing wildly, became an internet meme. To play the tricky rhythms live they added a second drummer, Clive Deamer, who had played with Portishead.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Now the darkest day in the band's history. On the sixteenth of June 2012, Radiohead were due to end their North American tour at Downsview Park in Toronto. About an hour before the gates were due to open, the roof of the temporary stage collapsed. The drum technician Scott Johnson, a thirty three year old from Doncaster who looked after Phil's kit, was killed instantly by a falling video screen weighing more than two tonnes. Three other crew members were injured. Phil described the sound as like an enormous cabinet of glasses falling over. The band seriously considered never touring again. At a vigil before the next show, in Nîmes in France, they offered the crew the chance to go home. Every one of them stayed, and the band played Reckoner with pictures of Scott on the screens.[1] [2] [3]

The legal aftermath dragged on for years. In 2013 Live Nation Canada, the staging company Optex and the engineer Domenic Cugliari were charged with thirteen offences under Ontario safety law. The trial collapsed when the judge was promoted, and in 2017 the case was thrown out because it had taken too long. Radiohead said they were appalled and called it an insult to Scott's memory. When they returned to Toronto in 2018 they held a minute's silence before Karma Police. A Canadian inquest in 2019 recorded accidental death, which the band found frustratingly insufficient, but a coroner in Doncaster found inadequate technical advice and wholly inadequate construction had caused the collapse. In 2020 Cugliari lost his engineering licence, and Scott's parents set up a fund that gives drum kits to schools.[1] [2] [3]

The ninth album was made under a cloud. Sessions began in 2014 and moved to a studio in the south of France in 2015. Nigel Godrich's father, Vic, died on the day the strings for Burn the Witch were recorded. In August 2015 Thom and Rachel Owen announced they had separated amicably after twenty three years together. The band were also asked to write the theme for the James Bond film Spectre, but their song was turned down, and they released it for free on Christmas Day. A Moon Shaped Pool arrived on the eighth of May 2016, with its songs in alphabetical order and the old live favourite True Love Waits finally recorded, twenty one years after it was first played. It became their sixth UK number one and was dedicated to Vic Godrich and Scott Johnson.[1] [2] [3]

A few months later, on the eighteenth of December 2016, Rachel Owen died of cancer at the age of forty eight. She was an artist and a scholar of Dante who taught at Oxford, and her influence ran through the band's history. Her words of comfort to Thom inspired the refrain of Optimistic, and her artwork appeared on the cover of Pop Is Dead. Thom had recorded his second solo album while she was ill, calling it a very bleak period. Radiohead dedicated the twentieth anniversary reissue of OK Computer to her memory. Looking back in 2026, Ed said A Moon Shaped Pool had been awful to make and that its story was so dark it casts a long shadow.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Controversy, a long pause and new bands

The Moon Shaped Pool tour ran through 2016, 2017 and 2018, and it brought back an old friend. When a fan shouted for Creep through most of a show, the band played it just to see how it felt, and then played it again at Glastonbury. In July 2017 they played Tel Aviv, ignoring the campaign for a cultural boycott of Israel. Roger Waters and the director Ken Loach criticised them, and more than fifty prominent figures signed a petition. Thom answered that playing in a country is not the same as endorsing its government. That summer the anniversary reissue OKNOTOK finally gave fans an official Lift, the song the band had shelved two decades earlier, along with the lost Man of War.[1] [2] [3]

Radiohead were nominated for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in their first year of eligibility and inducted on the twenty ninth of March 2019 at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. David Byrne of Talking Heads, whose song gave them their name, gave the speech, praising both their music and the way they released it. Only Ed and Phil turned up. Thom stayed away, later comparing awards ceremonies to a drunken car crash. Phil told the crowd they might not be the greatest musicians or the most media friendly band, but they had become very good at being Radiohead. That June, hours of OK Computer era recordings leaked online, and the band responded by selling them, with every penny going to the climate group Extinction Rebellion.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The pause became a golden age of side projects. Jonny earned Oscar nominations for his scores to Phantom Thread and The Power of the Dog. Thom scored the horror film Suspiria, with his son Noah on drums, and released the album Anima alongside a short film by Paul Thomas Anderson. In September 2020 he married the Italian actor Dajana Roncione in Sicily. Ed made his debut album, Earth, inspired by living in Brazil, and Phil released folk records and later joined Lanterns on the Lake on tour. Colin played bass with Nick Cave and published a book of his photographs of the band. But Ed was struggling. He fell into depression, felt he was finished with Radiohead, and found comfort in long walks near his home in Wales.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In May 2021 Thom and Jonny surprised everyone with a new band, the Smile, debuting on a livestream from Glastonbury with the jazz drummer Tom Skinner. The name came from a Ted Hughes poem, and Thom said it meant the smile of a man who lies to you every day. Jonny said it was a way to keep working with Thom during lockdown, and critics heard a looser, wilder band. The Smile released three albums between 2022 and 2024. Meanwhile Radiohead marked twenty one years of Kid A and Amnesiac with the reissue Kid A Mnesia, and when plans for a physical art show collapsed during the pandemic, they released it as a free video game style exhibition for the PlayStation 5 and computers.[1] [2] [3]

The war in Gaza put the band under intense pressure. Jonny is married to the Israeli artist Sharona Katan, and his nephew, who served in the Israeli army, was killed in the war. In May 2024 Jonny joined protests against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, then played Tel Aviv with the Israeli musician Dudu Tassa, drawing heavy criticism. In October 2024, at a solo show in Melbourne, Thom was heckled by a pro Palestinian protester, left the stage, and came back to play Karma Police. In May 2025 two UK concerts by Jonny and Tassa were cancelled after threats to the venues. That month Thom broke his silence, condemning Netanyahu and his government as extremists who needed to be stopped, condemning Hamas, and criticising social media witch hunts.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The return and the legacy

Quietly, in 2024, the five of them met to rehearse. Phil said it felt really good to reconnect with a musical identity lodged deep inside all of them, and Ed said the chemistry was there from the start. Thom said they had earned the right to do what made sense to them. In April 2025 his reworking of Hail to the Thief became the score for a Royal Shakespeare Company production of Hamlet, and in August the band released a live album of those songs from 2003 to 2009. That summer Let Down went viral on TikTok and entered the Billboard Hot 100 at number ninety one, twenty eight years after release. Ed's children told him not to be surprised, since teenagers are depressed and it is depressing music.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The tour was announced on the third of September 2025, after mysterious flyers appeared in European cities. It opened on the fourth of November at the Movistar Arena in Madrid, with the band playing in the round inside a ring of video screens and opening with Let Down. There were twenty arena shows in Madrid, Bologna, London, Berlin and Copenhagen, with Chris Vatalaro taking over as second drummer. The Copenhagen dates were pushed back when Thom developed a throat infection. The final London night drew twenty two thousand three hundred and fifty five people, a record for the O2 Arena, and every ticket included a donation to charity. Reviews were glowing, and Phil said their first Berlin show was the best they had ever played.[1] [2] [3]

In February 2026 the US immigration agency ICE used a choral version of Let Down in a social media video without permission. Radiohead told the amateurs running the account to take it down, adding a blunt farewell that cannot be repeated on the radio. In April a touring art installation based on Kid A Mnesia opened at Coachella. In May Ed released his second solo album, Blue Morpho, under his own name. That same month Harry Styles presented Thom with a fellowship at the Ivor Novello Awards, where he attacked the way the industry treats new artists and played a new song, Space Walk. As of 2026, Ed says there are no plans to record new Radiohead music, but the band are due to tour Australia and Japan in 2027.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

By 2011 Radiohead had sold more than thirty million albums. They have won six Grammy Awards, and with five albums shortlisted they have more Mercury Prize nominations than any other act. Seven of their singles reached the UK top ten. The Bends and OK Computer shaped a generation of British bands, from Coldplay and Travis to Muse, while Kid A showed how the internet could be used to release music, and In Rainbows became a model for surprise releases by artists like Beyoncé. They have kept the same core circle for decades, with Nigel Godrich often called the sixth member and Stanley Donwood designing every cover since 1994. One NME writer summed it up simply, calling them our generation's Beatles.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The people around Radiohead

Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood. Rock's great left brain and right brain partnership. Thom usually brings a sketch of a song and Jonny, the only member trained in music theory, develops its harmonies and arrangement. Thom has said Jonny is the impatient one who wants to move on while he likes to polish. They formed the Smile together in 2021, but in 2025 they publicly disagreed about Israel, with Thom refusing to play there and Jonny arguing boycotts backfire.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Colin Greenwood and Jonny Greenwood. The brothers in the band. Colin is two years older, and their older sister Susan introduced them both to gloomy post punk records at a time when their classmates loved Iron Maiden. Their father was an army bomb disposal expert. Colin brought Jonny into On a Friday, has played on his film scores, and says beyond the normal brotherly thing he respects him as a person and a musician.[1] [2]

Thom Yorke and Ed O'Brien. They met over a school play and have been a kind of family ever since. Ed has described himself as Thom's older brother in the band, saying Thom was like the dad and he was the mum, whose job was to put an arm around him. Ed talked Thom out of walking off stage at Glastonbury in 1997, and fought to keep Let Down on OK Computer when Thom wanted to drop it.[1] [2] [3]

Radiohead and Nigel Godrich. Godrich was a young engineer at RAK Studios when he met the band on The Bends, and they nicknamed him Nihilist. He has produced every Radiohead album since OK Computer and is often called the sixth member, a nod to George Martin and the Beatles. He is also in Atoms for Peace with Thom. He once told Thom off for thinking he had invented falsetto over acoustic guitar.[1] [2] [3]

Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood. They met on their first day at art college in Exeter. Donwood's first impression of Thom was of someone mouthy and angry, but someone he could work with. Since 1994 they have made every Radiohead cover together, with Donwood working near the studio while the band records. Donwood says they keep wrecking each other's work until one of them wins the painting. They shared a Grammy for Amnesiac.[1] [2]

Thom Yorke and Rachel Owen. They met as students at Exeter and were together for twenty three years, marrying in a secret ceremony in Oxfordshire in 2003. They had two children, Noah and Agnes. Rachel inspired the refrain of Optimistic and made artwork for Pop Is Dead. They separated amicably in 2015, and she died of cancer the following year. Radiohead dedicated the OK Computer anniversary reissue to her.[1] [2] [3]

Radiohead and EMI. EMI signed them in 1991 and released their first six albums, but the relationship soured after the label was sold to Terra Firma. When the band left, EMI put out a box set and a greatest hits album without their involvement, which many saw as revenge, and Thom called a wasted opportunity. In 2015 Radiohead sued Parlophone over download deductions, and the catalogue moved to XL in 2016.[1] [2]

Jonny Greenwood and Paul Thomas Anderson. Since There Will Be Blood in 2007, Jonny has scored film after film for the American director, including The Master, Phantom Thread and One Battle After Another. Anderson has in turn directed Radiohead videos such as Daydreaming, the short film for Thom's album Anima, and the documentary Junun about Jonny's recording trip to India.[1] [2] [3]

Thom Yorke and Michael Stipe. R.E.M. were one of Radiohead's biggest influences, and Thom admitted they ripped R.E.M. off for years. When Radiohead supported them in 1995, Stipe befriended Thom and gave him advice on coping with fame, including telling himself I'm not here, this isn't happening. That line became the chorus of How to Disappear Completely. Thom later joined R.E.M. on stage several times.[1] [2] [3]

Radiohead and Chris Hufford and Bryce Edge. The two Oxford studio owners saw On a Friday at the Jericho Tavern and became their managers before the record deal, and they have stayed ever since. Hufford nearly quit during the stressful Bends sessions, but later urged the band to make the album they wanted rather than worry about units. Their company also managed Supergrass.[1] [2]

Ed O'Brien and Johnny Marr. The Smiths guitarist, one of Radiohead's early heroes, helped Ed get sober and recover from depression around the year 2000. Marr also lent the band guitars, including a 1957 Gibson Les Paul, for the In Rainbows sessions, and once said Radiohead came closest to the real influence of the Smiths.[1] [2] [3]

Rare facts about Radiohead

• Jonny Greenwood spent his first months in On a Friday playing a keyboard that was switched off, and nobody noticed. The band had just fired a keyboard player for being too loud. Thom even praised Jonny's interesting texture, while Jonny secretly learned chords at home and slowly turned the volume up.[1]
• Thom Yorke was born with a paralysed left eye and had five operations by the age of six. He says the last operation was botched and left him with a drooping eyelid. He decided against more surgery and came to see the difference as a badge of pride.[1]
• As a ten year old, Thom Yorke built his own guitar, inspired by Brian May's homemade Red Special. He had decided to become a rock star after seeing the Queen guitarist on television at eight, and by eleven he had joined his first band and written his first song.[1]
• Colin Greenwood got Radiohead signed partly because he worked in a record shop. He was a sales assistant at Our Price in Oxford when an EMI rep mentioned he was moving into talent scouting at Parlophone. Colin handed him the band's latest demo.[1]
• The title Pablo Honey comes from an American prank phone call sketch. In the Jerky Boys routine, the caller pretends to be the victim's mother and asks Pablo to come to Florida. Thom said it suited them because they were mothers' boys.[1]
• For the intro of Anyone Can Play Guitar, everyone in the studio played guitar, including the cook. Producer Paul Kolderie wanted to live up to the title. Jonny Greenwood played his part with a paintbrush.[1]
• A teenage Four Tet was in the crowd when Radiohead filmed the Creep video in Oxford. The band played a free show at the Venue in Oxford for the shoot. Years later Four Tet supported Radiohead on tour and collaborated with Thom Yorke.[1]
• Radiohead were the very first musical guests on Late Night with Conan O'Brien. They played Creep on the show in September 1993, as the song was taking off across America.[1]
• The Bends is dedicated to the comedian Bill Hicks. Thom said Hicks could make incredibly frightening things funny, and by doing that make them seem okay.[1]
• Thom Yorke recorded his vocal for Planet Telex drunk, slumped in a corner. The song was written and recorded in a single evening at RAK Studios after the band came back from a restaurant.[1] [2]
• The Bends cover is a stretched photo of a medical training mannequin. Thom and Stanley Donwood went to an Oxford hospital to film an iron lung, found it visually boring, and filmed a resuscitation dummy instead, photographing it off a TV screen.[1]
• OK Computer was largely recorded in a mansion owned by the actress Jane Seymour. St Catherine's Court near Bath was empty at the time. The band recorded in different rooms, including a stone staircase and a ballroom.[1]
• The motorway on the OK Computer cover is in Hartford, Connecticut. It shows an interchange between two interstate highways in a city where Radiohead had played in 1996.[1]
• One rejected title for OK Computer was Your Home May Be at Risk If You Do Not Keep Up Payments. Another was Ones and Zeroes. A working title for Nude later made a similar joke about a house being at risk.[1] [2]
• The computer voice on Fitter Happier is called Fred and came from a Macintosh text program. Thom wrote the words in about ten minutes and called them the most upsetting thing he had ever written.[1]
• To promote OK Computer, Capitol sent out cassette players with the album permanently glued inside. About a thousand went to critics and industry figures in America, even though the label privately feared the record was commercial suicide.[1]
• The Karma Police video idea was first pitched to Marilyn Manson. Director Jonathan Glazer offered the car chase concept to Manson, who turned it down, and it was then suggested to Radiohead.[1]
• The name Karma Police began as a band in joke on tour. Whenever someone behaved badly on The Bends tour, the band would say the karma police would catch up with them eventually.[1]
• Thom Yorke turned down the chance to score the film Fight Club. He was approached in 1999 but declined because he was still recovering from the stress of the OK Computer tour.[1]
• The album title Kid A came from a file name on one of Thom Yorke's sequencers. He liked that it had no meaning, saying a specific title drives a record in a certain direction.[1]
• The beat of Idioteque was built around a sample Jonny found in a second hand record shop. It came from a 1970s computer piece by the American composer Paul Lansky. Jonny wrote to ask permission, and Lansky called the result imaginative and inventive.[1]
• Jazz legend Humphrey Lyttelton played on Amnesiac because his daughter showed him OK Computer. Jonny wrote to him saying the band were a bit stuck. His band played Life in a Glasshouse like a New Orleans funeral march.[1]
• The refrain of Optimistic came from Rachel Owen reassuring Thom. When he was frustrated with the band's slow progress on Kid A, she told him that the best you can is good enough.[1] [2]
• Two members of Radiohead played a wizard band in a Harry Potter film. Jonny Greenwood and Phil Selway joined Jarvis Cocker in the Weird Sisters for Goblet of Fire. A Canadian folk group called the Wyrd Sisters later sued over the name.[1] [2]
• Jonny's There Will Be Blood score could not compete for an Oscar. It included music from an earlier concert piece of his, Popcorn Superhet Receiver, which made it ineligible for Best Original Score.[1]
• The songs on A Moon Shaped Pool are in alphabetical order. Jonny Greenwood said they chose it simply because the running order worked well.[1]
• The strings on Burn the Witch were played with guitar picks instead of bows. The London Contemporary Orchestra plucked their parts, giving the song its nervous, percussive sound.[1]
• The special edition of A Moon Shaped Pool included a real scrap of old Radiohead master tape. Each piece was less than a second long. The band preferred to share the aging tape rather than let it end up as landfill.[1]
• Thom Yorke's Tomorrow's Modern Boxes was downloaded over a million times in six days via BitTorrent. It became the most downloaded legal torrent of 2014, part of his push to give musicians more control over selling their work.[1]
• Phil Selway volunteered as a telephone listener for the Samaritans for seventeen years. He kept doing it during Radiohead's biggest years, and said it probably kept him sane.[1]
• Ed O'Brien once played a cricket match against Chris Martin and Richard Thompson. Ed is a keen cricket fan, a love he has had since childhood alongside theatre.[1]
• Jonny Greenwood sells olive oil from his farm in Italy through Radiohead's online shop. His family divide their time between Oxford and the Marche region of Italy, and the oil went on sale in 2023.[1]
• Radiohead were one of the first bands in the world with a website. It launched with OK Computer in 1997. For the album's twentieth anniversary they briefly restored it to its original look.[1] [2]
• Radiohead's final London show of 2025 set an attendance record for the O2 Arena. The crowd was twenty two thousand three hundred and fifty five people, with the band playing in the round.[1]
• Thom's younger brother Andy is also a singer and has a PhD from the London School of Economics. Andy Yorke fronted the Oxford band Unbelievable Truth and worked as a Russian translator for Greenpeace in Moscow.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.