What’s the point of Radiohead in 2025? It’s been 40 years since the groundbreaking band formed at their Oxfordshire school. Across nine studio albums they have redefined rock, embraced electronica, and – more than any of their equally successful contemporaries – spoken to the knotty anxieties of modern society.
That world is even messier now, which might make Radiohead’s music – with song titles such as “Paranoid Android”, and lyrics recalling “a universal sigh” – more needed than ever. But Radiohead haven’t released any new music since 2016.
And while over previous decades lead singer Thom Yorke wrote songs about corrupt governments and lent his name to campaigns by Free Tibet and Friends of the Earth, in recent years the band has lost political traction, not least thanks to Yorke’s defence of their right to play in Israel. This came to a head in October last year, when he was heckled by a pro-Palestine campaigner during a solo show in Melbourne, prompting him to walk off stage. (Last month he said he would now not play in Israel, although band mate Jonny Greenwood, whose wife is Israeli, said he didn’t agree with Yorke.)
Radiohead were back to their near best as they played their first gig in 9 years. Photographer: Alex LakeCopyright: ALEX LAKE alexlake@twoshortdays.comBut at London’s O2 Arena on Friday night, the first of a four-night residency at the venue, any suggestion that this group are tired dissolves within a couple of songs.
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The quintet – also comprising bassist Colin Greenwood, drummer Phil Selway and guitarist Ed O’Brien, and joined by auxiliary percussionist Chris Vatalaro – play in the round, an inspired choice that brings a natural liveliness not always apparent in venues as corporate-feeling as this one.
Not that there was ever any real worry Yorke, an iconically idiosyncratic dancer, would ever stand still. He takes a seat at the piano to play the haunting first part of “Sit Down. Stand Up”, before jumping up for a crazed dance break that has him looking like an angular jellyfish. A couple of songs later, for the rhythmically brazen “15 Step”, he has lost all angularity, his hips totally loose.
This is, more or less, a greatest hits show. It’s all there: the brash percussion of “Idioteque”; the singalong melancholia of “Fake Plastic Trees” and “Just” (the only song Yorke introduces, saying the band wrote it on a “cold farm in 1994”); the frenzied romance of “Jigsaw Falling Into Place”.
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But after all this time, it’s the moments where the band opens themselves up to vulnerabilities that feel most significant. On “Videotape”, Yorke plays piano so tenderly the song sounds as though it were translucent, while on “There There”, O’Brien is so transfixed by the crowd, he hardly seems to notice when one of his drumsticks breaks in two.
Radiohead haven’t released a new record in nine years. They’re playing no unfamiliar songs on this tour, and nor have they implied new material is coming. But still the music sounds so fresh, so unlike anything else that has been written in the four decades since they started performing together. These songs remain transfixing. That’s the point.
Radiohead play the O2 again tonight and on 24 and 25 November.
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