Radiohead live in London: returning heroes shut up and play the hits
At their first UK show in eight years and amid uncertainty about their future, the band provide a timely reminder of their outstanding catalogue
Countless questions have swirled around the future of Radiohead as the band return to the stage for the first time this decade. Nine years on from their last album – 2016’s A Moon Shaped Pool – and with Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood established within prolific side-project The Smile, the likelihood of another Radiohead album feels completely up in the air.
The tour, the band have said, represents the chance to work out whether the fire is still there to make more music and tour extensively in the future. For now, they are playing four gigs each in five European cities across the end of 2025 – a trial run of sorts.
These run of dates have also been clouded by calls for a boycott by the BDS movement, owing to the band’s previous performances in Israel. “What the BDS are asking of us is impossible,” drummer Phil Selway told The Times recently in a rare interview with the band, discussing Jonny’s ties with Israel (the guitarist is married to an Israeli artist). “They want us to distance ourselves from Jonny, but that would mean the end of the band.”
With this backdrop, as well as the admission that “the wheels came off” for the band at the end of the A Moon Shaped Pool tour, it feels like a lot is riding on this small run of shows. The way through it, the band appear to think, is to shut up and play the hits.
At the first of four nights at The O2 in London – the band’s first gigs in their homeland in eight years – they dip into every corner of their illustrious career. It can easily be described as a greatest hits set, but such a description could take any number of forms for a band with such a diverse arsenal of beloved material. It also means something different now to when they last played nearly a decade ago.
In that time, 2007 record In Rainbows has become their most beloved album to a new generation of fans, and its highlights ‘Jigsaw Falling into Place’ and ‘Weird Fishes/Arpeggi’ get the biggest cheers of the night, even above those reserved for the timeless ‘No Surprises’ and ‘Paranoid Android’ from OK Computer.
Performing in the round, the band begin with The Bends opener ‘Planet Telex’, partially obscured by panoramic screens. When those screens then rise up a few minutes later at the drop of the scything ‘2+2=5’, a pulsating energy floods the room.
Across the two-hour gig, Yorke works the entire room, performing in each corner of the round stage and feeling like more of an entertainer than ever before. Alongside him, his bandmates dip into the revolutionary Kid A (in a stunning mid-set run of ‘Idioteque’, ‘Everything in Its Right Place’ and ‘The National Anthem’), the politicised Hail to the Thief (‘Sit Down. Stand Up.’, ‘There There’, ‘A Wolf at the Door’) and their heart-wrenching anthems (‘Fake Plastic Trees’, ‘Let Down’, ‘Karma Police’). Never before has a Radiohead show so accurately shown the breadth and range of their brilliance from across their career.
As for the future of the band, little more can be gleaned from the performance except that they appear to be having a ball running through hit after hit. There are no big declarations from the stage – just Yorke telling the innocent story of the band writing ‘Just’ in 1994 as an attempt to emerge from under the shadow of ‘Creep’ – but they do display an abridged version of the Declaration of Human Rights on the screens as people file out of the exits.
Of all the questions following this tour around, only one is comprehensively answered tonight: this is without doubt the greatest songbook of the last 30 years, and its power only continues to grow.