From getting signed after 8 gigs to hiring a keyboard player that couldn't play keys,
it took Radiohead a lot longer than you'd think to become the prolific musicians they are today.
Being in a band like Radiohead is
the dream of many high school-aged musicians who yearn to find like-minded band members and
begin making and performing music. Radiohead themselves are the perfect inspiration for
aspiring musicians in this position, as they first got together in high school.
As The Sydney Morning Herald mentions, Radiohead all attended a boys' school named Abingdon in
Oxford, England. Lead vocalist Thom Yorke was something of an outcast at the time, being bullied
over problems with his eye. However, in 1985, he got together with bandmates Ed O'Brien, Philip
Selway, and Colin Greenwood and they started playing music, quickly impressing his bandmates.
"He's always been incredibly prolific as well, which was, you know, very — well,
it's very impressive in a 34 year-old — but especially in a 16 year-old."
Back in the 1980s, the group wasn't yet Radiohead, going instead by the name of
On A Friday. According to an old Guitar World article, the name was chosen purely because
this was when the members got together to rehearse in their school music rooms.
Two years after first getting together, On A Friday had their first-ever live performance,
playing a gig at Oxford's Jericho Tavern. In addition to the four original members,
Colin Greenwood's younger brother, Jonny, also performed with them,
playing harmonica. However, it would be some time before he became an official member of the group.
Jonny Greenwood was the last of Radiohead's
five members to join up, but it wasn't his first musical project either. As BuzzFeed explains,
Jonny was originally in a band called Illiterate Hands, fronted by Thom Yorke's younger brother,
Andy. Andy is an accomplished singer and songwriter in his own right,
and his band The Unbelievable Truth was even featured in a 1998 MTV article. However,
his sound was vastly different from the aesthetic that would eventually lead Radiohead to stardom.
Jonny's first stage performance with Thom Yorke's band may have been with a harmonica,
but he eventually joined the others as a keyboard player. In an interview for NPR,
he mentions how he got the opportunity because the band's original keyboardist
didn't get along with the band, so they hired Jonny as a replacement.
There was just one small problem: at the time, Jonny Greenwood couldn't
actually play the keyboard. In a classic example of fake-it-till-you-make-it,
Jonny actually attended months of rehearsals with his keyboard
switched off. Since his bandmates were playing so loudly, they didn't even
notice the absence of his playing while he gradually learned the instrument at night.
First released in 1992, "Creep" was Radiohead's breakout single. However, an article from Mojo
says the band wasn't especially fond of it, sharing a rumor that Jonny's famous guitar
crunches before the chorus was an attempt to ruin a song that he didn't like. The single version of
"Creep" was recorded in just one take and only reached No. 78 in the U.K. charts.
Far Out magazine explains that "Creep" was blacklisted by the BBC's Radio 1 for being,
quote, "too depressing." The BBC itself, which was one of the primary platforms for musicians in the
UK to get their music circulated, also claims that the numerous swear words throughout the song were
also considered unacceptable to air. The song was re-released in 1993, with some of the profanity
removed. From there, the clean version of the track managed to reach No. 7 on the U.K. charts.
According to Rolling Stone, Thom Yorke says he's not too satisfied with the lyrics either,
calling them, quote, "pretty crap." Despite this, "Creep" eventually launched Radiohead's
success in America, with a San Francisco radio station naming the song its favorite of the year.
"Folks, please welcome, one of our favorites, Radiohead!"
The song eventually became a source of so much disdain for the band that they started to grow
sick of it. Yorke began to noticeably freeze up in interviews when "Creep" was mentioned,
and Radiohead even started refusing to play it in concerts. According to Uncut,
after getting requests to play it from an audience in Montreal, the band responded,
"F--- off, we're tired of it!"
Radiohead's second album, The Bends,
contains some of the band's most iconic tracks, including the song "High and Dry." This song,
however, was not written for Radiohead but for another band. In 1989, Thom Yorke played
with a punk band named Headless Chickens while at university. A YouTube video shows a recording of
a Headless Chickens gig in which Yorke plays the song "High and Dry," albeit in a very different
style to the laid-back acoustic guitar-driven track that Radiohead would later record.
The thing is, at the time, Radiohead didn't really exist yet. While the band had gotten together a
few years before, they were still performing as On A Friday. As an archived 2008 article from Q
Magazine explains, the band didn't choose the name Radiohead until they signed a record deal
with EMI in 1991. "High and Dry" isn't the only song that's technically older than Radiohead by
this metric either. As Rolling Stone reports, Thom Yorke also wrote "Creep" while he was in college.
In addition to being the site of the
first On A Friday performance, Oxford's Jericho Tavern was also where Radiohead signed their first
record deal with EMI, according to Q Magazine. The deal took place on December 21, 1991,
essentially kicking off the long musical careers of everyone in the band. The interesting part is,
while they were playing as a group for five years, they had only played a total of eight gigs.
Part of the reason for this is that the members all put music on hold for four years to go to
college. According to Guitar World, they didn't give a single live performance for the entire
time they were studying. This is not to say, however, that they didn't spend any time playing
music. As an old article by The New Yorker explains, Radiohead members continued to get
together on weekends to practice in an attempt to figure out what style of music best suited them.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s,
the internet was still fairly new and just beginning to gain popularity. As Pitchfork
explains, Radiohead connected with the chaotic early web users
as they were one of the first bands to have a website, not that they used it much.
Instead, the band's online presence relied heavily on fan-made websites like "At Ease,"
"Follow Me Around," and "Green Plastic." As fellow trailblazer for contemporary internet
culture Bo Burnham poignantly reflects in his special INSIDE, most of the internet was made
on free homepage sites and chat rooms at the time, and Radiohead found a lot of popularity
among that early generation of people who liked to spend their free time online.
The group's expansive online fanbase was a factor in its decision to give its fourth album,
Kid A, an online live stream before its release in 2000. In the 2020s,
prerelease live streams are nothing unusual, but according to Grantland,
Radiohead's live stream for Kid A essentially pioneered the tactic.
The stream used a player that any website could embed and fans loved it. Over
1000 sites posted Kid A, which received over 400,000 streams. This is an impressive feat,
considering only 413 million people were using the internet at the time.
The prerelease stream was probably part of what helped Kid A eventually reach No. 1 on
U.S. album charts, even though the album itself certainly didn't meet universal love.
"You got half a star on Billboard and then you
got a two-page cover in TIME that says 'Radiohead is god.'"
After Radiohead's contract with EMI ended, the group made another record industry first with
the release of their seventh studio album. In Rainbows was self-released
online using a pay-what-you-want model, even for those who wanted to pay nothing.
Only 38% of people who downloaded In Rainbows paid anything at all. It was also shared widely
on BitTorrent, getting downloaded 2.3 million times in the first 24 days after its release.
The most remarkable thing about all of this is that it was still a resounding success.
In an interview with Wired just two months after the release of In Rainbows,
Thom Yorke said that, in terms of digital income, In Rainbows made more than all of
Radiohead's previous albums put together. Since their contract was signed before the internet
achieved widespread popularity, EMI hadn't been paying them at all for digital sales.
According to Rolling Stone, Thom Yorke has remained deeply skeptical of major
labels ever since, describing them as a, quote, "sinking ship."
Radiohead's drummer, Philip Selway, is deeply humanitarian. An article in The
Independent explains how he volunteered with the charity Samaritans for 20 years,
first as a listening volunteer receiving phone calls from people in need,
then as an appointed ambassador acting as a champion for mental health and wellbeing.
Most astonishingly, he did all of this while also raising a family, drumming for Radiohead,
and pursuing other musical projects. He reasons that it helps to keep him
humble. Putting others first was Selway's means of avoiding the narcissism that can
easily arise while playing in any band, let alone one as monolithic as Radiohead.
Even now, Selway is an active supporter of charities. He announced on Twitter
that he would present the 2022 awards for the charity St. Martin's Challenge,
which provides grants to society's most vulnerable people. Organized by a charity,
it's a non-profit event, and all proceeds go toward supporting Samaritans.
After spending some time with Radiohead's members, an interviewer at SPIN observed,
"Everyone in this band probably reads more than you do;
hanging out with Radiohead is kind of like getting high with a bunch of librarians."
Of the five erudite musicians, though, Colin Greenwood is particularly literary,
having studied post-war American writers like Raymond Carver while at university,
according to an article in Mojo. As Time mentions, Thom Yorke once quipped that
Greenwood had probably downloaded enough books to fill a library. In fact, Greenwood is such
an enthusiastic reader that the same SPIN magazine article mentions that he talked about 15 different
books during the course of a single interview before giving one to the interviewer as a gift.
It seems that Colin enjoys reading poetry as well as prose, as in 2004, he was on the panel of
judges for a poetry competition, Next Generation Poets, organized by the Poetry Book Society and
funded by Arts Council England, according to NME. The Guide magazine reported that he even
brought the poems he was judging on tour to look them over in his downtime. Evidently, he enjoyed
being part of the panel enough that he returned for a different poetry competition in 2007.
Across the many styles of music
Radiohead emulates, the originality of their songs sticks out. Part of the reason behind the band's
distinct style is that Thom Yorke has a mild form of synesthesia, a neurological condition that
causes sensory perceptions to become mixed. People with synesthesia may be able to taste colors, hear
shapes, or see music. In a 2019 radio interview, Yorke stresses that, while he isn't fully
synesthetic, when music is particularly powerful, he gets a, quote, "almost visual" sensation.
In an older interview for MTV Japan, Yorke also mentioned that he could
smell tunes and see them as colors. He described the Radiohead album OK
Computer as being a "mucky white," like Tipp-Ex - a European brand of
correction fluid. This distinct look is reflected in the album's cover artwork.
On a related note, The Guardian reports that Radiohead's album Kid A was influenced
by music from Aphex Twin, another well-known artist with synesthesia. Radiohead, in turn,
has gone on to influence other synesthete artists like Melissa McCracken, who makes
paintings based on the colors and shapes she sees when listening to music. Several of her paintings
show Radiohead songs, including "Videotape," "Spinning Plates," and "Weird Fishes."
In 2015, Radiohead was commissioned
to write a theme song for the James Bond movie Spectre. As Rolling Stone writes,
this had the unfortunate effect of throwing off the momentum the band had built while trying to
record their most recent album, A Moon Shaped Pool. Radiohead's producer, Nigel Godrich,
described the song as a huge waste of energy that dragged tracking for the album to a dead stop.
"That all sounds lovely."
In the end, as BBC News reports, the band's song was rejected, and Sam Smith's song
"Writing's on the Wall" was chosen in its place. So Radiohead uploaded their song,
Spectre, to Soundcloud on December 25, 2015. Despite the disruption the song caused,
there were evidently no hard feelings, as the upload was accompanied by a caption reading,
"It didn't work out, but became something of our own, which we love very much."
Long-time fans of Radiohead
are used to the group taking extended pauses between albums,
so it was no great surprise in 2020 when NME reported that its members were taking some time
apart. The band's hiatus was announced in the midst of several solo projects,
including a soundtrack for the film Suspiria and some classical compositions Thom Yorke was working
on. The band members are determined, however, that they aren't done working together as Radiohead.
Guitarist Ed O'Brien spoke with NME, saying that they were definitely going to make another album,
with the caveat that he was unsure when. The band had actually planned to go on
tour in 2021 but was forced to cancel because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Thom Yorke, in particular, was rather more blunt about his
intention to make another Radiohead album. According to Rolling Stone,
when he was asked if A Moon Shaped Pool would be Radiohead's final album, he replied,
"I f---ing hope not."
When Radiohead might return to the recording studio is currently anyone's guess, but fans
can rest assured that they haven't heard the last of the group. In O'Brien's words,
"When it feels right to plug back into Radiohead, then we will."