Radiohead’s singer Thom Yorke doesn’t speak much during the band’s long-awaited return to the UK stage on Friday. But when he does, it’s to chivvy along whoever should be raising the electronic panels encasing the band so they can begin the encore. “Whenever you’re ready,” he quips.
Radiohead’s fans might well have aimed the same phrase at their heroes. Missing in action since 2018, when they concluded the tour for their 2016 album A Moon Shaped Pool, Radiohead mysteriously crackled back into life, which might’ve been this year’s biggest 90s reunion story.
As it was, 2025’s ticketing meltdowns belonged to Oasis, and the joy of Radiohead’s reappearance is a delight reserved for the relative cognoscenti. They are no small constituency, however: understated, compared with the Oasis hoopla, but sufficient to fill four oversubscribed nights at London’s O2 arena and an ongoing European campaign. One fan, queuing to get in through the shrill plasticky shopping mall that surrounds the venue, gleefully describes it as “a Ballardian hellscape”. Oasis played a little-changing set list of around 25 songs; Radiohead a fluid selection drawing on 43 tracks overall so far.
Radiohead, then, are emphatically not the sort of band to do the obvious thing. They perform in the round, presumably to favour crowd sightlines and more sinuous movement throughout the band, as well as upending traditional entertainment-industry staging assumptions. Multiple members play various instruments, and everyone from sound scientist Jonny Greenwood to affable guitarist Ed O’Brien seems to pull a shift on shakers and maracas tonight, alongside touring percussionist Chris Vatalaro. Yorke moves from east to west, north to south, from guitar to keyboards to interpretive dancing, while Greenwood’s scything, floppy-fringed actions on guitar, keyboards and bits of gear remain concentrated in one quadrant.
In latter years the Oxfordshire quintet have become positively renowned for complex songs in fretful time signatures – like 15 Step from In Rainbows (2007), particularly tricksy tonight, especially when the crowd is urged to clap along. Yorke’s soaring falsetto has delivered words suffused with dread and tenderness: the woozy, grief-stricken Daydreaming from 2016’s A Moon Shaped Pool hits hard.
And yet tonight, the five-piece deliver something akin to a greatest hits set to widespread fan pleasure. The first song of the encore is Fake Plastic Trees, one of three selections from The Bends, the 1995 album that established Radiohead as a major force, and a record they seemed to run away from almost as soon as it became successful.
A braver outing, OK Computer (1997) made Radiohead massive. Five songs from that record are represented tonight, including huge crowd singalongs such as Karma Police and No Surprises. The latterday younger-fan-favourite Let Down has TikTok to thank for a new influx of young admirers.
Like those other major 90s refuseniks, Nirvana, Radiohead found fame difficult, so the band changed tack again for 2000’s even more abstract and experimental Kid A (four tracks tonight, including signature songs like Idioteque and Everything In Its Right Place).
A Moon Shaped Pool came out nearly a decade ago. Since then, it has felt as though Yorke and Greenwood’s other band, The Smile - which includes the versatile jazz percussionist Tom Skinner (Sons of Kemet) – might have become the focus group for the two Radiohead principals, outside their own busy solo careers.
This tour has no obvious raison d’être: no new album that we know of. Technically 2025 marks the 40th anniversary of the five teenagers meeting at school and forming a band that would become On A Friday, the precursor to Radiohead. But you wouldn’t mark this awkward, iconoclastic band out as particularly sentimental about dates. Perhaps they wanted to make their fans… happy?
Playing now also risks opprobrium. Radiohead have been the subject of a boycott call from the BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) movement, which opposes Israeli military action against Palestinian civilians, over the band’s 2017 gig in Israel and Greenwood’s side projects there more recently. Prior to the band’s recent statements, critics have contrasted Radiohead’s unwillingness to condemn Israeli action in Palestine with their previous role as trenchant critics of bad government and the cynicism of power: from the George Orwell-referencing 2+2=5 (an early crowd rouser tonight) to an entire album, Hail To The Thief (2003), dedicated to disgust at the war on terror (it yields five tracks tonight). Earlier this year, the play Hamlet Hail to the Thief combined the album with Shakespeare.
The Palestine issue has simmered sourly, with the band clarifying their positions in fits and starts. Last May, Yorke took to Instagram to defend his right not to engage with an Australian heckler on the subject.
In a recent interview, Yorke stated that he would not play in Israel now. “I wouldn’t want to be 5,000 miles anywhere near the Netanyahu regime,” he said. Greenwood, whose wife is Israeli, defended his right to separate the actions of the Israeli government from his collaborations with Israeli musicians (and musicians of other nationalities).
Tonight there are no obvious keffiyehs in the crowd – visible at many 2025 gigs – or obvious signs of protests. The gig ends, perhaps ironically, with Karma Police – and the European convention on human rights displayed on the screens. It’s a pointed nod at those such as Reform UK who would wish the UK to renege on its humanist principles – and a reminder that Radiohead still have a claim on theirs.
Photograph by Alex Lake, twoshortdays.com, @twoshortdays