The song that opened Radiohead’s show Monday night at London’s O2 Arena is older than a respectable portion of the crowd. It was “Planet Telex,” and for years it sat forgotten on the sidelines, like most of the band’s pre-“OK Computer” material, the album that turned them from a very good, highly regarded group into gods of modern music. They became the one rock act measured not against the Beatles or Pink Floyd, but against Beethoven and Bach.
Accordingly, Radiohead’s brand of ambition never went hand in hand with songs that gathered distortion dust, nor with concerts that did not push new material. Nostalgia was not merely marked as undesirable. It was the enemy.
But Radiohead in 2025 is a slightly different band from the one that has not performed in more than seven years. The shift started on the previous tour, when Radiohead discovered it could make peace with “Creep,” the firstborn, successful and yet unloved child in their hits catalog. The time that has passed brought experiments outside the group, personal and political scars, and even ordinary things that happen to people less talented than they are, like aging. All of that may have helped them realize it was time to loosen a few habits.
Do not worry. Radiohead is not staging its' version of Taylor Swift’s “Eras Tour.” Even in a crowd-pleasing phase, the band's loyalty is first and foremost to the highest level of musical and stage experience, not to a set list designed to satisfy everyone. One reason is simple: pleasing everyone would require a show twice as long as the two hours in which Radiohead played 25 songs.
Radiohead perform “No Surprises” at a London show
(Video: Einav Schiff)
Also, and this is a pleasant surprise, the answer to what delights the crowd has changed. It turns out, for example, that songs from 2007’s “In Rainbows,” like “Weird Fishes” and “Bodysnatchers,” draw reactions no less enthusiastic than the classics you would think of first. By contrast, no one seemed bothered by the occasional absence of beloved live staples like “There There” and “Lotus Flower.” And no one, literally no one, cared that “Creep” was not played, partly because they gave us “Just.”
Maybe the generosity in this column is not about the songs at all, but about the people who wrote them, sweated blood and fire to make them whole and perfect, then convinced half the planet that this broccoli tastes like a hamburger, and probably better. In their fourth decade together, Radiohead is a remarkably organic unit of individualists, a whole whose parts always know what they should be doing, yet remain fully free within that space to test limits and shove them outward.
Radiohead perform “15 Step” at a London show
(Video: Einav Schiff)
That is certainly true of singer Thom Yorke and the band’s musical architect Jonny Greenwood, who use the 360° stage so they never stay in one place, just like the band they guide through rough waters. Yorke looks like someone who had simply been waiting for a situation where people actually pay him a lot of money to dance as if none of the 20,000 pairs of eyes in the crowd are watching. His performance remains electric and hypnotic at 57. And the singing? Well, not every rendition sounds like God lives in his throat as a key tenant, but he made sure the anthemic peaks of “Karma Police” and “No Surprises” stayed clean.
What makes a Radiohead show so thrilling is one simple, decisive fact: anyone who loves this band knows there is not, and may never be, anything like what they can do in the head and in the heart. Not because the world lacks great music in the sense of challenging, interesting, thought-provoking and moving. It is because no other band has managed, song after song and album after album, to forge an identity that is far larger than this hit or that favorite.
Radiohead perform “Fake Plastic Trees” at a London show
(Video: Einav Schiff)
To see Radiohead is to hear a dull trace of feedback and know “Idioteque” is about to explode. It is to hear the words “the panic, the vomit” and remember the first, second and 200th time “Paranoid Android” blew your mind. And only at a Radiohead show can you sing, “For a minute there, I lost myself,” and feel as if that specific minute could last forever.
First published: 00:16, 11.27.25