It looks likely that Thom Yorke will release a solo album later this year. That’s according to his Radiohead bandmate, Ed O’Brien, anyway.

The guitarist was talking to the Kyle Meredith With... podcast about his own, upcoming solo record Morpho, as well as Radiohead activity, and suggested that the band now acts as a ‘mothership’ for all their various activity. “What’s so lovely is, it feels they both can coexist. The Radiohead thing can go out and tour — and that’s the mothership, I guess, for all of us.”

“But we’ve got these little satellites. You know, there’s the Smile, and Thom’s got a solo album that’s going to come out later in the year, I think. And Jonny’s got his stuff, and you know, Philip (Selway)’s got his stuff, and Colin (Greenwood)’s playing with Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds.”

If O’Brien is right, it will Yorke’s fourth solo album and his first since 2019’s Anima. Of course, the singer has also been involved in a whole heap of stuff besides. Apart from The Smile, he’s recorded two soundtracks – for the films Suspiria (2018) and Confidenza (2024).

There’s been a collaborative album with Mark Pritchard – last year’s Tall Tales and he also acted as executive producer on the 2023 album Sus by British electronica producer Clark.

And as for Radiohead activity? Well, don’t expect anything for the rest of 2026. Last week in another interview promoting Morpho with Rolling Stone, O’Brien suggested that the band were looking to repeat their recent run of European residency shows on other continents.

“What we’re going to do is, every year we’re going to do a different continent, and we’re going to do 20 shows each year. No more, no less,” the guitarist said. “We won’t do anything this year, but we’ll do something next year.”

It looks like Radiohead’s recent run of residency shows won’t be a one-off and that the band have more planned. But not until 2027.

That’s according to no less an authority than Ed O’Brien, who in a new interview with Rolling Stone has said that the band are going to repeat the idea in other continents – in North America, South America and in Asia/Oceania.

“It’s definitely happening,” the guitarist explained. “What we’re going to do is, every year we’re going to do a different continent, and we’re going to do 20 shows each year. No more, no less.”

“We won’t do anything this year, but we’ll do something next year… We want to give absolutely everything each night,” he said of the 20-show model.

“We do not ever want it to be like we’re going through the motions or we’re having to run on empty. We’ve got to be able to do it. And you know what? We’re not spring chickens anymore.”

So looking ahead, and assuming that the band don’t get diverted along the way, Radiohead should complete what will surely be the slowest world tour on record sometime in 2029...

Anyway, O’Brien says that for all the band, the European shows were a positive experience: “That tour was very, very emotional, very profound. We all felt that. We’d look at one another on that stage, like, ‘This is amazing.’ I feel like I’m the luckiest person on the planet, and I’m not just saying that.”

The guitarist has a new solo record out soon. Blue Morpho comes six years after Earth, which was released slap bang in the middle of lockdown, in April 2020. It was put together during a time when O’Brien was struggling with his own demons around 2021.

“I went into a deep depression,” he says of that time. “It was the first time in my life that I had to stop. And what I realised was that I’d been keeping busy, like a lot of people do, running from these ghosts of my past, particularly from my childhood.”

“From 1990 or ’91 through to 2018, when we stopped touring and went on hiatus, it was pretty much nonstop,” he says. “It’s all-encompassing and it demands your full attention, and it’s addictive in that way. But it’s not necessarily healthy, because you just keep going, keep going, keep going. And then when you stop, suddenly the ghosts catch up.”

His therapy, he explains, was recording the new album, which is produced by Paul Epworth and features an interesting cast of musicians, including UK jazz magus Shabaka Hutchings, Estonian composer Tõnu Kõrvits on string arrangements and his Radiohead bandmate, Philip Selway.

“It’s been a really beautiful journey,” he says of the new album. “This record has taken a long time, but I wouldn’t change it, because there’s been so much life in the record, and that has added to the richness.”

Radiohead have indicated that something is afoot, or soon will be. It seems they have formed a new limited company.

As logged at Companies House in London, the five members – Thom Yorke, the Greenwood brothers, Ed O’Brien and Philip Selway – are the directors of the new company, which has been given the none-more Radiohead-ish name of Futile Endeavours Limited.

As fans and long-term Radiohead watchers know, since they left EMI Records in 2007 the formation of a new company is usually the presage of a new spurt of band activity, be that a tour, reissue or a new album project.

And so before the In Rainbows album, they formed Xurbia Xendless Ltd, Dawn Chorus Ltd was followed by the A Moon Shaped Pool album in 2016 and Spin With A Grin Ltd was formed six months before the Kid A Mnesia reissue in 2021.

Fans, of course, will hope that Futile Endeavours means the band intend to go back into the studio to record new music, though of course it could simply mean another reissue. Or more touring.

Radiohead returned to the stage late last year when they performed a series of residencies in European cities. In an interview with The Times a couple of weeks ago, Jonny Greenwood said of that experience: “It was great to revisit songs that we always felt were good and to find lots of other people now agree with us. And it was really nice to be playing and listening to Thom (Yorke) again. But I found it strange not to be doing anything new on the tour.”

When asked the $64 million question about new material, the guitarist kept his cards close to his chest, saying that all five members were: “doing new music elsewhere now” and that he had “no idea” if they would record together again.

“I mean, I’m surprised that the tour actually happened and that we all enjoyed it so much,” he continued. “But venues get booked so far in advance. To do another we would have to decide now, and even then it wouldn’t happen for 18 months.”

Almost three decades after his death, Jeff Buckley has finally scored a hit on the Billboard Hot 100 this week, when Lover, You Should Have Come Over entered at Number 97.

The reason is, inevitably, because the song has gone viral on social media, TikTok specifically. Though viewings on the platform don’t actually count towards the US chart, the track has obviously stirred up enough interest that it’s spilled over onto other platforms.

Positioned as track two on the second side (if we’re talking vinyl) Lover, You Should Have Come Over is in many ways the pivotal song on Grace, the only album Buckley released in his lifetime. It’s a six-minute ballad with some stylish, unexpected chord changes, shiwcasing Buckley’s impassioned vocal embellished by harmonium, organ and some brilliant percussion from drummer Matt Johnson. Its coda sees Buckley show off his full vocal range, twisting, diving and pirouetting like a dancer in full flight.

The lyric was inspired by his relationship with his then-girlfriend Rebecca Moore and by all accounts was based on a real life event. At one gig in Italy before he died, Buckley introduced the song by saying: "I wrote this song while lying, listening to the telephone in my apartment... but she never called."

It is, of course, easy to scour the lyrics for meaning but lines like ‘I feel too young to hold on/ And much too old to break free and run’ can’t help but feel poignant knowing now that their writer had just three years left to live.

Though Grace is now acknowledged as a classic album, it – and Buckley as an artist – was very much a cult concern at the time. In his lifetime, he had only one minor UK hit – Last Goodbye stalled at Number 54 in 1994 and though contemporary reviews of Grace were positive, sales were slow – it reached a pitiful Number 149 on Billboard.

Buckley went out on the road to promote it and indeed one of the UK shows on the tour, at the Highbury Garage in September 1994, was to prove pivotal for one British band. At the time, Radiohead were struggling recording The Bends and had hit an impasse with one track in particular: Fake Plastic Trees. Taking a break, Thom Yorke, Colin Greenwood and producer John Leckie popped into the Garage and were suitably inspired.

“He just had a Telecaster and a pint of Guinness. And it was just amazing, really inspirational,” Colin Greenwood later told Uncut. “Then we went back to the studio and tried an acoustic version of Fake Plastic Trees. Thom sat down and played it in three takes, then just burst into tears afterwards. And that’s what we used for the record.”

It wasn't just Radiohead who were listening. Luminaries as diverse as David Bowie, Bob Dylan and Robert Plant all hymned the brilliance of Grace. Muse frontman and guitarist Matt Bellamy said that hearing the album convinced him to use falsetto and would later buy the Telecaster Buckley had used on Grace. Apres Radiohead and Muse le deluge, of early Noughties sensitive male singer-songwriters using falsetto.

We can hardly pin the blame for those on Buckley. But one senses, with the current revival of Lover, You Should Have Come Over, and the success of last year’s Amy Berg documentary, It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley, that thirty years after he departed this earth, the Jeff Buckley heritage industry is only just getting started.

Radiohead have announced that they are having to postpone two of their Copenhagen shows due to Thom Yorke’s "extreme” throat infection.

The affected gigs are tonight’s (December 1) and tomorrow’s (December 2). These have now been pushed back to Monday December 15 and Tuesday December 16, respectively. Tickets for the shows will be automatically transferred to the new dates, and fans are encouraged to contact their point of purchase if they require a refund.

At present, the other two Copenhagen dates, on Thursday and Friday (December 4 and 5) are going ahead. The thinking being that Yorke’s Strepsils will have worked their magic by then.

The band have issued a statement, saying: ‘Radiohead are gutted to have to announce the postponement of their first two Copenhagen dates this week - tonight, December 1, and tomorrow, December 2. The shows have been rescheduled for December 15 and 16 respectively.

"Thom Yorke has been diagnosed with an extreme throat infection.”

The group’s statement continues, “We are devastated to have to postpone these two shows at such short notice but Thom’s throat infection has made it impossible for him to sing.”

“Treatment is underway and we’re hopeful Thom will recover in time to play the final two Copenhagen shows on Dec 4 and 5, and all four Berlin shows, starting on Dec 8.

"We have been so blown away by the audience reactions on these dates and are loving being back onstage again; needless to say we feel terrible that we are unable to play tonight and tomorrow.”

The band completed their four-night residency at London’s O2 last week to rave reviews. After the Copenhagen dates that haven’t been postponed, they have four shows at the Uber Arena in Berlin from December 8 to 12.

Radiohead played the second gig of their Madrid residency last night (November 5) and they appear to be making good on their “busking approach” to their setlists.

The group have apparently rehearsed over 65 songs from their back catalogue and changed up their set from the first night in Madrid significantly. In came a number of songs from The Bends: Planet Telex, the title track, Street Spirit (Fade Out) and (Nice Dream) – the latter played for the first time since 2009. There were also some additions from 2007’s In Rainbows too, namely Jigsaw Falling Into Place, Nude and All I Need.

And out went Sit Down Stand Up, Bloom, No Surprises, Videotape, 15 Step, Lucky, Fake Plastic Trees and How To Disappear Completely.

All of which keeps things interesting both for the band and fans. On both nights they played Paranoid Android, Idioteque and There There, which are all close to permanent fixtures in Radiohead setlists going back over a decade. Though that could change. They’ve got another 18 gigs across November and part of December, in Bologna, London, Copenhagen and Berlin.

Anyway, the full setlist from the second Madrid date on Wednesday 5 November is:

2 + 2 = 5
The Bends
Jigsaw Falling Into Place
All I Need
Ful Stop
Nude
Reckoner
Airbag
Separator
Pyramid Song
You and Whose Army?
Idioteque
(Nice Dream)
There There
Myxomatosis
Exit Music (For A Film)
Street Spirit (Fade Out)

Encore:
Let Down
Weird Fishes/Arpeggi
Planet Telex
Present Tense
The Daily Mail
Paranoid Android
Everything In Its Right Place

It will be interesting to see how the setlists develop from here, whether the band will dip more fully into less celebrated albums, such as 2011’s The King Of Limbs or their dimly-remembered debut Pablo Honey. Or even if they will try out any new material? Who knows?

Radiohead have returned to the stage for the first time in seven years, kicking off their European tour with a dazzling, career-spanning set at Madrid's Movistar Arena.

The show marks the start of the band's long-awaited return tour, which will see them play a total of 20 dates across five European residencies in November and December.

The legendary Oxford rockers delighted fans with a 25-song set, playing tracks from every studio album bar Pablo Honey, and starting with fan-favourite-come-viral-hit, Let Down (which Yorke recently confessed he didn't even want to keep on OK Computer).

The set continued with picks from the band's 2003 record, Hail to the Thief (including 2 + 2 = 5 and the first outing of Sit Down. Stand Up since 2004), before rattling through King of Limb's Bloom, Ok Computer's Lucky, and A Moon Shaped Pool's Ful Stop.

Although refraining from much in the way of crowd interaction, frontman Thom Yorke seemed upbeat throughout the show, with fans capturing his unique and expressive dancing during a number of tracks, including yet more Hail to the Thief picks like Myxomatosis and The Gloaming.

As well as a liberal sprinkling of OK Computer hits like No Surprises, Paranoid Android and Karma Police, the set also contained highlights from the iconic left-turn follow-up Kid A, such as synth-driven tracks Idioteque and Everything In It's Right Place, the brooding The National Anthem, and the haunting How to Disappear Completely.

There were plenty of other fan favourites too, including the likes of Weird Fishes/Arpeggi, Videotape, 15 Step and Bodysnatchers from 2007's In Rainbow's; another Hail to the Thief deep cut in the wordy A Wolf at the Door; and the trance-like Daydreaming, which was from A Moon Shaped Pool, the band's most recent LP released back in 2016.

After Idioteque, Radiohead closed out their set with a seven-song encore featuring Fake Plastic Trees (the show's only song from The Bends), Subterranean Homesick Alien, There There (for a grand total of six Hail to the Thief titles), and a lone song from 2001's Amnesiac, You and Whose Army?.

IDIOTEQUE from r/radiohead

It's not just fans who are glad the band are back on stage - their return has been well-received by critics too, with plenty of glowing reviews arriving after the show had concluded.

Both Stephen Phelan at The Guardian and Will Hodgkinson at The Times gave the tour opener a hefty five-star ratings, with Hodgkinson describing the show as "a remarkable two hours" and Phelan calling it "an absolute joy".

Craig McLean at The Independent called the band "transcendent", even after 87 months away from touring, and the likes of Angie Martoccio for Rolling Stone and Neil McCormick over at The Telegraph were equally impressed by the band's ability to simultaneously dazzle audiences, live up to their lofty reputation and have fun doing it.

"Radiohead play like they are principally there to amuse themselves", writes McCormick. "The fact that they can mesmerise an arena full of fans whilst they are doing so is a testament to just what an outrageously exciting band they are."

There's no doubt that the band seem to be enjoying their comeback (and their first shows in the round) as much as their audience is, and as Angie Martoccio notes "as they’ve proved over the last seven years, they don’t need to do these shows" - they're just a long-awaited treat for Radiohead fans young and old.

Radiohead are due to play another 19 dates across Europe, including another tonight in Madrid. It's anyone's guess what they'll be playing, given the anything-goes "busking" approach the band is taking to the 70-song setlist, but you can see the full list of tour dates below:

• 4th / 5th / 7th / 8th November – Madrid, Spain, Movistar Arena
• 14th / 15th / 17th / 18th November – Bologna, Italy, Unipol Arena
• 21st / 22nd / 24th / 25th November – London, UK, The O2
• 1st / 2nd / 4th / 5th December – Copenhagen, Denmark, Royal Arena
• 8th / 9th / 11th / 12th December – Berlin, Germany, Uber Arena

The full Radiohead 2025 setlist

• Let Down
• 2 + 2 = 5
• Sit Down. Stand Up.
• Bloom
• Lucky
• Ful Stop
• The Gloaming
• Myxomatosis
• No Surprises
• Videotape
• Weird Fishes/Arpeggi
• Everything in Its Right Place
• 15 Step
• The National Anthem
• Daydreaming
• A Wolf at the Door
• Bodysnatchers
• Idioteque
  
  
  
  • Encore
• Fake Plastic Trees
• Subterranean Homesick Alien
• Paranoid Android
• How to Disappear Completely
• You and Whose Army?
• There There

With their series of European residencies fast approaching, the five members of Radiohead have given their first proper interview for years to the Sunday Times.

As you’d expect, it’s fascinating. For one thing, we found out that Ed O’Brien almost left the band in a dispute over whether they should include the song Let Down on seminal 1997 album OK Computer. For a long time, this was one of the lesser known tracks on the album, but it went viral over the summer and entered the Billboard chart for the first time.

That alone Thom Yorke found baffling. “I find that especially bizarre,” he said, "Because I fought tooth and nail for it not to be on the record, but Ed was, like, ‘If it’s not, I’m leaving.’”

For O’Brien, Let Down is “the emotional heart of the record," but admits that he too was "astonished” when it entered the US chart. “So I told my kids, who are 18 and 21," he recalls, "and they said, ‘What do you expect? Teenagers are depressed. It’s depressing music!’”

The band also talk about why they went on hiatus in 2018 and why it’s taken them so long to return. “I guess the wheels came off a bit, so we had to stop,” Yorke says. “There were a lot of elements. The shows felt great but it was, like, let’s halt now before we walk off this cliff.”

The singer was also grieving. His first wife and mother of his children, Rachel Owen, had just died of cancer. “I needed to stop anyway,” he says. “[My grief] was coming out in ways that made me think, I need to take this away.”

We also found out that Ed O’Brien was the most reluctant to return to the group after their long layoff. “I was nervous going into [the recent] rehearsals because I was effectively over Radiohead. It wasn’t great on the last round. I enjoyed the gigs but hated the rest. We felt disconnected, fucking spent. It happens. This has been our whole life - what else is there? Look, success has a funny effect on people - I just didn’t want to do it any more. And I told them that.”

“I went through a very long dark night of the soul,” the guitarist continued. “I had a deep depression. I hit the bottom in 2021. And one of the things that was lovely coming out of it was realising how much I love these guys. I met them when I was 17 and I have gone from thinking I can’t see myself doing it again to realising that, you know, we do have some stellar songs.”

And as for the big question of whether they will be playing any new material at the upcoming shows, or even if there'll ever be any new Radiohead songs again, the various band members wouldn't be drawn.

“I don’t know,” said Jonny Greenwood says. “We haven’t thought past the tour.” Thom Yorke, meanwhile, is "just stunned we got this far.”

It’s D-day for Radiohead fans trying to get tickets for the band’s five European residencies, but even before the sale opened this morning (September 12) it was being reported that up to 1,000 fraudulent tickets were being advertised online.

This is despite the hurdles that were put in place to thwart touts. First of all, fans had to pre-register. Then they had to apply for an unlock code. Only those lucky punters provided with a code could apply for tickets and even then they were not guaranteed them.

But despite this, there have been reports of tickets for sale on the secondary site Ticombo. These, it seems, were ‘speculative’ listings. In other words, touts were gambling on being able to get tickets so they could sell them on at a profit. This is against the law.

“The registration process, while not a perfect science, is an attempt to deliver tickets as fairly as possible directly to fans at the prices the band intended,” said the band’s manager Julie Calland.

She continued: “Radiohead have always strived to protect their audience from exploitative ticket touts which, in the absence of robust government legislation, becomes increasingly challenging.”

“Fans will be encouraged to stay away from secondary sites and we will work alongside venues, promoters and organisations like FanFair Alliance and FEAT (Face-value European Alliance for Ticketing), to shut down unauthorised sales at inflated prices – tickets that for the most part, don’t actually exist.”

Ticombo are claiming that there is “no evidence that the listings in question are speculative or fraudulent” and have removed them. They told the Guardian that they “merely provide a technology platform” rather than actually selling tickets. However, it should be pointed out that they take a commission on every ticket sold on their platform.

In addition to this Viagogo, the largest secondary ticketing site, has also said that they will be selling Radiohead tickets from today (September 12) and in a statement appeared to take aim at Radiohead’s ticketing policy saying: “We are fully compliant in the UK, where resale is highly regulated and permitted under the law.”

“Some organisers take anti-competitive actions and try to limit where tickets can be bought or sold. We exist to serve fans on their terms – whether they missed the onsale, are buying tickets just days before the event, or need to sell at the last minute.”

Of course, those last three are legitimate reasons why an ordinary punter might want to use a secondary site. But Viagogo is clearly being disingenuous here - no genuine fan would ever sell a ticket they had just purchased on the same day.

And so when the best laid plans of bands can’t frustrate the touts, it’s clear it will take legislation to clean up the secondary ticketing market. In a statement the Department Of Business and Trade said, regarding this issue: “The Radiohead tour is a great opportunity for fans to enjoy live music – but too often rip-off touts are ruining the gig-going experience.

“We are considering the evidence provided in response to our consultation earlier this year and are committed to clamping down on this activity as part of the Plan for Change.”

Last week, Radiohead announced their first live dates for seven years and now attention has turned to what they’ll actually play at the series of European residencies later this year.

In a new interview on the Adam Buxton Podcast, bassist Colin Greenwood has suggested that the band will take a “busking approach” to assembling their setlist.

“Oh, I think it’s going to be a mixed set,” he told Buxton. “I think we’ve like whittled it down to about 70 songs. And me and my brother (guitarist Jonny Greenwood) are not on the setlist committee, we’re not allowed, because we’re too indecisive.”

“So we’ll play anything in any order, at any time. We sort of take a busking attitude to the Radiohead setlist,” he added before hinting that if rehearsals throw up new material, they could chuck that in too:

“It’s going to be the first time I think we’ve done shows where we haven’t got new material to play as work in progress. But you never know, some stuff might come up or not or whatever, so.”

Tickets for the five residencies go on sale this Friday and if you’re interested you should have already registered on Radiohead’s website. Fans will have to wait until Wednesday (September 10) to see if they have received an unlock code to buy tickets.

Punters will only be allowed to buy a maximum of four tickets each and the largest portion of seats will be allocated to fans living nearer the shows.

“There will be allocations for those who wish to travel inside Europe and for those outside Europe,” the band have said in a statement. “Our aim is to distribute tickets according to demand in a fair and geographically convenient way.”

To their credit, the band have also announced that UK ticket prices will include a £1 levy that will go to the Music Live Trust’s initiative to raise funds for grassroots venues. For the European dates, €1 per ticket will go to Médecins Sans Frontières, with Radiohead promising to match the total raised.

It’s official: Radiohead are playing residencies in five European cities later this year.

There had been speculation, fuelled by flyers that had been found in London, Copenhagen and Madrid yesterday. But this afternoon the band confirmed the rumours. They will be playing a total of 20 shows, four in each city – in those three capitals as well as Berlin and Madrid.

So here are the deets: Radiohead play the Movistar Arena in Madrid on November 4, 5, 7 and 8. They then move on to the Unipol Arena in Bologna on November 14, 15, 17 and 18. They’re at London’s O2 on November 21, 22, 24 and 25, Copenhagen’s Royal Arena on December 1, 2, 4 and 5 and finally the Uber Arena in Berlin on December 8, 9, 11, 12.

To get tickets you need to pre-register at radiohead.com. Registeration opens this Friday (September 5) at 10am UK time and closes at 10pm UK time on Sunday (September 7). Then the ticket bunfight will commence on Friday 12. For more information go the band’s website.

Expect tickets to be snapped up very, very quickly. Fans, after all, have been waiting the best part of a decade for this news.

Drummer Philip Selway has put out a statement, saying, almost nonchalantly: “Last year, we got together to rehearse, just for the hell of it. After a seven year pause, it felt really good to play the songs again and reconnect with a musical identity that has become lodged deep inside all five of us. It also made us want to play some shows together, so we hope you can make it to one of the upcoming dates. For now, it will just be these ones but who knows where this will all lead.”

There’s no indication that they will be any other dates around the world at this stage, nor that any new music is around the corner.

Radiohead have surprise-released a new live album comprised of recordings of materials from their 2003 album Hail To The Thief, their last for EMI.

The 12-track album was recorded over a long time period – from their 2003 tour to the end of the In Rainbows tour in 2009 – and is streaming now, with physical copies to follow on October 31. For vinyl fans, there will be a limited edition red vinyl on offer from independent record stores and a cyan edition, which is exclusive to Radiohead’s own W.A.S.T.E store.

The catalyst for the new album, it seems, was when Thom Yorke started going through live recordings from around this period while preparing the arrangements for the Hamlet Hail To The Thief production, which played in Manchester and Stratford-upon-Avon this summer.

In a statement, Yorke said: “I was shocked by the kind of energy behind the way we played, and it really helped me find a way forward. For us, back in the day, the finishing of this record was particularly messy and fraught, we were very proud of it but there was a taste left in our mouths, it was a dark time in so many ways.”

“Anyway, we decided to get these live recordings mixed (it would have been insane to keep them for ourselves) by Ben Baptie, who did an amazing job. It has all been a very cathartic process, we very much hope you enjoy them.”

The live album marks the first Radiohead activity since the band formed a new business entity – a limited liability partnership, back in March - suggesting that they were gearing up for... something. In the past, the band have formed LLPs in preparation for a new album campaign and fans were hopeful that news would soon come through that the band had been in the studio.

The band haven’t released a new album since 2016’s A Moon Shaped Pool and haven’t played live since 2018.

It’s one of the great debut singles by a guitar band – but it’s also caused a whole lot of trouble over the years.

Radiohead’s Creep was their first step on the road to worldwide fame, even if their sound today is largely unrecognisable from such comparably straightforward and humble beginnings.

The song had actually been written by singer/guitarist Thom Yorke before the group had even formed, while Yorke was studying at the University Of Exeter in the late 1980s.

A few years later, during the sessions for the band’s debut album Pablo Honey at Chipping Norton Recording Studios, it was co-producer Paul Q. Kolderie who suggested they run through a quick take of Creep – the band members unaware, according to drummer Philip Selway, that they were being recorded.

A piano part was later added by guitarist Jonny Greenwood, though thanks to a production oversight, it was only included towards the end of the song.

Upon learning that Yorke’s description of Creep as their “Scott Walker song” was in fact a joke, Kolderie then suggested they release it as the lead single in 1992.

It was initially unsuccessful at home in the UK, but heavy rotation on Israeli and American rock radio turned Creep into an international hit, with a similar self-deprecating ‘slacker’ feel to Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit, released the year prior, and Beck’s Loser, which came in early 1993.

Controversy came when Radiohead were sued by songwriters Albert Hammond and Mike Hazlewood, who argued that Creep infringed on their own copyright, borrowing heavily from their 1972 song The Air That I Breathe, famously covered by the Hollies two years later.

As a result, Hammond and Hazlewood were later credited as co-writers.

But this bizarre story doesn’t end there.

In 2018, Radiohead launched their own court case against Lana Del Rey for similarities between Creep and her track Get Free, although no amendments were made to the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers.

Del Rey later told an audience that the lawsuit was over, revealing: “I guess I can sing that song any time I want.”

Prince also sang his own version of Creep, surprising the audience at Coachella 2008 with a cover that included some of his own amendments, although his representatives ensured it was kept off streaming services after the performance.

Yorke found the situation “hilarious”, given that his bandmate Ed O'Brien had been blocked from seeing The Purple One unexpectedly pay tribute to the song that started it all for them.

In an interview with Billboard, Yorke referred to Prince, saying: “Tell him to unblock it. It’s our song.”

The Radiohead original – which still stands as one of their most guitar-centric offerings to date – is a fairly simple arrangement based around the chord progression G/B/C/Cmin, although there’s a little more to it if you look at the notes played during the verses and pre-choruses.

There are moments where the arpeggios alternate from standard major barre chords to sus4 shapes on the B and C chords.

By the time we get to the pre-choruses, the three higher strings are introduced to instil a sense of momentum and build.

But the real fireworks arrive just seconds before the chorus when Jonny Greenwood rakes three pairs of dead notes on his guitar with a herculean amount of gain compared to the tremolo-effected clean guitars that precede it.

The multi-instrumentalist Greenwood later confessed that he did this out of frustration at the song’s overall quietness, although the shimmering clean arpeggios of the verse sections are quickly replaced by the thunder of overdriven power chords during the chorus.

Co-guitarist Ed O'Brien went as far as admitting “that’s the sound of Jonny trying to fuck the song up” because “he really didn’t like it the first time we played it”. O’Brien added that Greenwood’s violent musical outbursts effectively “made the song”.

Yorke also reflected on how well Greenwood’s distorted contributions ended up complimenting the message behind the music, noting how it was “a real self-destruct song” that called for extremely intense dynamics through drops and lifts.

The biggest of those lifts arrives after the second chorus when Yorke sings “She’s runnin’ out the door” as Greenwood scratches his guitar into oblivion, using octave shapes to create a counter melody above the unassuming chord movement that runs through the entire four minutes.

For the final verse, it all simmers back down, ending with Yorke’s moody observation: “I don’t belong here."

There has been some debate over the meaning of the song’s lyrics over the years, with the band members stating it was in fact a happy song about recognising what you are, as well as the total opposite – realising you are not good enough for the person you are in love with.

Yorke stated that his lyrics were written during “a pretty strange period in my life”, when he was attending college and “really fucked up”.

He also confessed that he had “a real problem being a man in the ’90s”, reasoning: “To actually assert yourself in a masculine way without looking like you’re in a hard rock band is a very difficult thing to do.”

He went on to explain: “It comes back to the music we write, which is not effeminate, but it’s not brutal in its arrogance”.

33 years on, Creep remains an anthem for disenfranchised youth – and while it is highly unlikely that the Radiohead of today would write a song of such minimalist fashion, it undoubtedly played a crucial part in their rise.

When Taylor Swift dressed as a member of Kiss for an on-stage prank, nobody was happier than Kiss star Gene Simmons.

The prank happened back in 2009 when Swift was touring with singer Keith Urban.

During a concert in Missouri, Urban was performing his hit song Kiss A Girl when Swift and her band walked on stage in Kiss makeup and costumes.

Swift was in the guise of original Kiss lead guitarist Ace Frehley.

Simmons still enjoys talking about it now, and tells MusicRadar: “I invite everybody to go on YouTube and tag ‘Taylor Swift Kiss band’. Even Keith Urban put out there. You'll see Taylor and her band coming out in Kiss makeup and doing a song. Oh yeah!”

Simmons also describes himself as a Radiohead fan, although he admits that he and Thom Yorke are polar opposites in their attitudes to the music business.

Simmons refers to Radiohead’s 2007 album In Rainbows, for which the band offered a ‘pay what you want’ deal.

“Thom Yorke is an an amazing songwriter and one of the finest vocal performers around,” Simmons says. “But you could pay what you want for a Radiohead record? That didn't last long, did it?

“You only do that once. Because people will go, ‘Oh, I can get something for free or pay what I want to pay? I don't want to pay anything!’

“And don't get me wrong – I'm a big fan of Radiohead. But I hear that Thom Yorke always gets upset when I say, ‘Yeah, but we make Kiss condoms and they can’t.’”

Simmons reckons the music business has changed almost beyond recognition since the 1970s, when Kiss became major stars.

“It's a different animal,” he says. “From 1958 until 1988 is 30 years. What came out during that time?

“Well, with the record companies supporting the artists you had Elvis, The Beatles, the Stones and Pink Floyd and Hendrix and on and on and on. And the solo artists, Prince and Bowie.

“And in the same period of time, Motown was full blast, and disco, and you had Madonna. And the heavy bands were there – Metallica and AC/DC, Aerosmith, and Kiss, if you like.

“It was a ripe and healthy music scene, because there was a support system.

“But the business model has changed. The days of a new hot band being courted by record labels, where they offer millions of dollars, non-refundable? Those days are gone.

“Record companies now make a lot of money without having to pay the artist much. So until lawmakers release new laws – so that new music cannot be downloaded or streamed without more money going to the artist who owns it – until then it's like a supermarket with the doors wide open, with people just grabbing whatever they want.”

But there is hope for the future, Simmons says. He still believes there are many great young artists out there making great music. And among them are his own son, Nick Simmons, and his friend Evan Stanley, the son of Kiss frontman and fellow co-founder Paul Stanley.

“Nick, our son, and Evan, Paul’s son, they’ve been pals for their whole lives,” Simmons says, “because they went to see their dads at work – wearing more makeup and high heels than their moms, as it happens.

“So they were pals, and they both got into music very heavily, but completely differently.

“Nick was much more into Radiohead, ethereal music – and by the way, his music wound up in TV shows.

“And Evan had kind of a rock band thing where he was a writer and singer.

“But one day, not too long ago, Evan came over to Nick's house, and he had an acoustic guitar. And you can go on YouTube and see it – Evan Stanley and Nick Simmons singing [Simon & Garfunkel classic] The Sound Of Silence.

“One acoustic guitar, and they're singing together. And when you hear that sound, you go, ‘Wait a minute!’ It's like the Everly Brothers, that blend.

“There's something about the timbre of voices that either works or it doesn’t. Hendrix and Madonna doing harmonies? That's not going to work. But Lennon McCartney? It works. Simon & Garfunkel, obviously. Crosby, Stills & Nash…”

Simmons says there will be more news on Nick and Evan’s project very soon.

“Now they're recording their first album,” he says, “and record companies are all over them."

Thom Yorke has released a new track that doubles up as a theme for the new Apple TV+ series, Smoke.

It’s called Dialing In and if you’re a fan of the Radiohead singer and it sounds familiar, you’re not going mad. Although it hasn’t been released until now, Yorke has been playing it at live shows under its previous title, Gawpers.

Speaking about working with Yorke for the theme, the creator and executive producer of Smoke, Dennis Lehane, blew plenty of, er, smoke up the Radiohead singer’s behind. “Working with Thom Yorke was as much an honour for me as working with Clint Eastwood, Martin Scorsese or Richard Price," he said.

“I’ve somehow been blessed with collaborating with living legends who were also formative influences on my own creative life. Thom is definitely that. In addition, he took a basic concept I gave him and delivered a song that perfectly embodies the show and absolutely crushes.”

Smoke is set to launch on Apple TV+ from June 27. Check out the official trailer below.

Yorke has been nothing if not busy recently. In addition to this new track, earlier this month he released Tall Tales, a new album in collaboration with producer Mark Pritchard.

As for Radiohead activity... there were rumours that the band were gearing up to announce a tour when it was revealed in March that the five members have formed a new legal partnership. According to long term Radiohead-watchers, this is usually a precursor to a burst of new activity from the band. As yet, though, nothing has been confirmed.

It’s no secret that many bands write their best and most enduring material in their early years, buoyed by youthful vigour and a hunger for recognition. All too often, fame and fortune can render an artist complacent, diluting the inspiration that spurred them on to reach such creative heights in the first place.

Radiohead aren’t your average band, though. That much was evident from the very first notes of their era-defining 1992 debut single, Creep, which - in the words of Conan O’Brien - raised self-loathing to the status of an art form, introducing this group of downcast, floppy-haired Oxfordshire lads, barely a few years out of school, to a worldwide audience.

Over the years that followed, the group reshaped their guitar-centered sound into increasingly imaginative forms, their early influences - R.E.M, Bowie and The Pixies - steadily becoming less identifiable, as Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood’s outré tendencies edged them ever-further away from the templates and traditions of conventional songwriting.

By the end of the decade, Radiohead had put out OK Computer - near-universally considered to be one of the greatest rock albums ever recorded - before almost abandoning the guitar altogether to release a duo of divisively adventurous follow-ups that reimagined what the genre could be through avant-garde electronics and studio experimentation.

But the best was still yet to come. At a point where many bands might rest on their laurels, content to churn out increasingly lifeless facsimiles of the records that paid for their houses, Radiohead seemed determined to relentlessly pursue a new sound, a better sound, and above all, a different sound.

That hunger has been audible in every one of the band’s releases since, from the Orwellian anthems of Hail to the Thief to the majestic melancholy of A Moon Shaped Pool, but it finds its zenith in 2007’s In Rainbows, an album that - though its release was somewhat overshadowed by its controversial pay-what-you-want model - stands tall in Radiohead’s catalogue as their most cohesive statement, a band-defining release that Yorke once described as the group’s “classic album”, painting it as their Revolver or Hunky Dory.

But it was this very album that almost precipitated the group’s demise. “The recording of the album took three years, which is a long time by anybody’s standards. “It pretty much half-killed us,” guitarist Ed O’Brien told Midem.com in 2010. “Whether the band would continue was very much in the balance.”

Following the release of 2003’s Hail to the Thief, Radiohead found themselves lacking in direction. That record, born during two months of live shows and recorded hastily over a two-week stint in Los Angeles, ultimately proved to be overlong and unfocused. "We should have pruned it down to 10 songs, then it would have been a really good record," O'Brien told Mojo in 2008. "I think we lost people on a couple of tracks and it broke the spell."

The album was also their last to be recorded under the auspices of EMI, the label the group had reluctantly laboured under since the release of Pablo Honey. Freed from their corporate shackles and not entirely satisfied with their recent output, the band assembled in early 2005 at their Oxfordshire HQ, with the goal of crafting a leaner, more direct record; a “concise body of work, with no fat”. “Our aim was to describe in 45 minutes, as coherently and conclusively as possible, what moves us,” Yorke said.

Months passed, and the band’s attempts to mold Thom’s initial ideas into a coherent, album-shaped form without the help of a producer proved fruitless, leading the frontman to share an ominous update to the band’s blog Dead Air Space later that year: “We're splitting up. It's all shit. We're washed up, finished.” Bassist Colin Greenwood described a “crisis of self-conifidence” that left the band shaken to its core. “Everyone had lost… not interest, but momentum,” Yorke told Rolling Stone. “We’d all stopped to have kids. When we got back into the studio, it was just dead.”

Later that year, the band enlisted the help of Spike Stent, a decorated engineer known for his work with Massive Attack, Björk and Madonna, to help them make sense of material they’d recorded over the frustratingly unproductive months prior. After having worked so closely - and so successfully - with long-time producer Nigel Godrich since The Bends, bringing in somebody new was a gamble - and it didn’t pay off.

“It never really took off,” O’Brien said of the group’s sessions with Stent. Yorke was more vocal, sharing cryptic asides on Dead Air Space that describe the feeling of being “trapped in la la land”. "I've been fucking tearing my hair out,” he wrote. “Too much at once. Furiously writing, working out parts, cracking up. Not much time left. Unsure about everything.”

The missing link, it seemed, was Godrich. After two months with Stent proved unsuccessful, the band managed to lure their former producer - often described as Radiohead’s unofficial sixth member - back into the fold. “Things came together when Nigel started working with us again,” Colin said, pointing to Godrich’s ability to keep the band accountable. “Before then it was pie in the sky.”

Progress came thick and fast after Godrich’s return, as Radiohead headed out to a crumbling country house for a three-week recording session that gave birth to Bodysnatchers and Jigsaw Falling Into Place, two of the album’s angriest and most fast-paced cuts. As sessions continued at Godrich’s own Hospital Studio towards the end of 2006, more reflective songs like Nude and Videotape - In Rainbows’ beating heart - began to take shape.

As 2007 approached, the band grew increasingly mindful that two years had passed since they’d started work on the project. A deadline was set for July, and work continued at a rapid clip at Radiohead's own Oxfordshire studio, as songs like 15 Step and Weird Fishes were recorded and re-recorded, progressively redrafted until they began to develop their own character.

Summer arrived, and with it the deadline, as Radiohead assembled at Yorke’s Oxfordshire home to listen through mastered versions of the 10 tracks that would become In Rainbows; in order to end up on the finished project, every track required unanimous approval. The verdict was positive. "The first time we all sat down and felt that it had worked was when we finalised the tracklisting and had the finished CD," drummer Phil Selway said. "It was only at that point that we completely believed that we'd made the record that we wanted to."

After almost three years, In Rainbows was finished. From the fitful 15 Step, which pairs a spasmodic 5/4 groove with samples of a children’s choir, through to the elegiac Videotape - a song that features some compelling rhythmic quirks of its own - the record showcased a band at their creative peak, two decades into their career but more ambitious than ever.

No single track symbolized this ambition more than Weird Fishes / Arpeggi. An epic and ethereal journey into the murky depths of Yorke’s subconscious, the track repurposed ideas from Jonny Greenwood’s then-nascent experiments in contemporary classical composition into a guitar-led context, culminating in a rock song with the scope of a full-blown symphony.

Before it was a Radiohead song, Weird Fishes was an orchestral composition, the name of which became its secondary title: Arpeggi. Its first public performance - and the first glimpse of any material that would end up on In Rainbows - occurred two years prior to the album’s release, at a concert curated by Greenwood in which the London Sinfonietta performed thorny pieces by Ligeti and Messiaen, before premiering a handful of his own compositions.

At the end of the performance, Yorke strolled on stage looking typically unbothered, before the ensemble launched into a mesmerizing tapestry of sound; one threaded with the descending sequences of notes, interlocking in opposing time signatures, that give the piece its name.

Much like Yorke’s fixation with electronic music, the primary motivation behind Kid A’s starkly synthetic sound, Greenwood’s extra-curricular obsession with 20th-century classical music, and his experiences scoring films, pushed Radiohead in experimental new directions. "I get these enthusiasms which can drive the band crazy," Greenwood told The Guardian in 2005.

"But I just say: listen, French horns are amazing, we've got to find a way of using them. Or I'll say, it would be great if this song sounded like Penderecki, or Alice Coltrane. And it's childish because none of us can play jazz like Alice Coltrane, and none of us can write the kind of music that Penderecki does. We've only got guitars and a basic knowledge of music, but we reach for these things and miss. That's what's cool about it."

Another of In Rainbows’ highlights can be found in Nude, a song that envelops you like a warm bath after the cold-water shock of Bodysnatchers’ acerbic riffage. Haunting and tender in mood, Nude hangs some archetypally Yorkeian lyrics - “don’t get any big ideas, they’re not gonna happen” - on a sinuous bassline that’s surely one of Colin Greenwood’s finest moments.

It was this bassline that brought the song to life, according to Nigel Godrich’s account; the song had in fact been kicking around since The Bends era, but early versions built around Hammond organ and distorted guitars were ultimately abandoned. “We tried to record it a couple more times for OK Computer, probably about three times for Kid A and another three times for Hail To The Thief,” Godrich told Word Magazine. “But somehow it had gone.”

Godrich recalls visiting Greenwood after the band’s Stent sessions had reached a disappointing conclusion: “He'd written his new bassline, which transformed it from something very straight into something that had much more of a rhythmic flow. The chorus had been taken out – very Radiohead! – and there was this new vocal break and this new end section.”

“Songs have a kind of window where they are really most alive – and you have to capture it,” Godrich added. “Nude missed its window, and it took a lot of reinvention to bring it back to the place where we could capture it again in a way that resonated for the people playing it. It was essentially the same song; nothing had really changed. What has changed are the people playing it.”

However ambitious its songs may be, the music that made up In Rainbows was, at least for a time, eclipsed by its groundbreaking release model, which invited fans to pay whatever they wanted for a digital download. Arriving at a time when digital piracy had begun to eat into physical sales and streaming platforms had yet to present a viable alternative, In Rainbows’ release seemed to throw the entire future of the music industry into question - a result that Greenwood says was all part of the plan.

“We weren’t giving the record away. We were saying: ‘What is it worth?’” he said. “Music is one of the only commodified art forms where when you walk into a store and records by Dylan, Roxette, Klaxons or The Hives are the same price. Does that mean they’re all as good as each other? Is there a way to say, by how much you pay, how good or bad something is? It’s good that the whole experience has got people asking those kind of questions.”

“It would be nice if what we did was free up artists and musicians to think, ‘I don't have to sign my name in blood, maybe I can do this in a different way,’” Yorke added. “But that's about it. All we did was respond to a particular situation, and it was the logical thing to do, captain. We saw it as the best way to get the music we'd worked so hard on heard by the most people."

Despite giving fans the option to download the album free of charge, In Rainbows became a major commercial success; Yorke has since revealed that the band made more money from digital sales of the album than the digital sales of all previous Radiohead albums combined. The physical release hit No 1 on the UK Albums Chart, and the album’s deluxe “discbox” edition, priced at $80 and including a bonus disc with eight additional tracks, sold 100,000 copies.

”I never felt we were one of the great bands, up there with The Smiths or R.E.M.,” O’Brien told Mojo following the album's release. ”In my view, we've made three really great records: The Bends, OK Computer and Kid A. What we needed was another great record just to seal it.”

Forged amid self-doubt and upheaval, In Rainbows could well have been the end of Radiohead. Instead, it became their "classic album", standing as a testament to the band’s sky-high aspirations and their determination never to repeat themselves. It may not be as zeitgeist-capturing as The Bends, as universally resonant as OK Computer, or as audaciously experimental as Kid A, but In Rainbows draws on lessons learned from all three, documenting the painful, glorious process of a band rediscovering its sound.

When it comes to songwriting, we're frequently told that chord progressions, rhythms, melodies or arrangements should conform to the general rules and strictures of music theory. Listeners won't like it, the experts say, if you go too far off-road, intermix keys, introduce chords from rogue scales or abruptly change pace half-way through.

But even a scant glance at some of music's most influential and beloved artists reveals that often bravery - and following where your song feels like it wants to go - can result in the most memorable songs of not just your career, but of all time.

Aside from feeling the pull of a unique idea, there’s a range of other reasons why artists might want to subvert the rules - there's those that want to deliberately shock or provoke the listener's attention. There are also those that technically conform to the boundaries of key and chord structures, but take remarkable routes to their destinations.

What we can learn from all of these tracks is that we shouldn’t be trepidatious about being more adventurous when songwriting. Yes, those standard ‘advised’ chord sequences are the canonical routes you should take, but - as our choice selection of weird and wonderfully constructed songs demonstrate - ignoring the rulebook can yield the most extraordinary results.

God Only Knows - The Beach Boys

God Only Knows - The Beach Boys

We’ll start with the daddy of them all. God Only Knows isn't just one of the finest love songs of all time, but is also among the most theoretically elusive and bewitching.

When you lift up the rock and gaze at the chordal structure of Brian Wilson’s 1966 epic (and its arrangement as a whole) a labyrinthine maze of key-evading choices, diminished and inverted chords, and non-tonic bass parts are revealed.

Argument rages over whether the Pet Sounds' masterpiece is in the key of A or the key of E, as the song tugs away from a singular center.

Though its intro’s confluence of instruments point towards an A major key, a plaintive French horn introduces a D# - hinting towards E major. The verse begins on a D chord with a passing bass tone in B, before changing to a B minor6 chord, which erodes the impression of E being the tonic, but then further chords lead us back to E.

This rising progression (F#M/F#M7/B7/A) solidifies us on E, before the song’s (beautiful) refrain - ‘God only knows what I’d be without you’ - seems to revert back to A major, and a sense of resolution after a hue of cloudy emotions (and chords!).

Your straightforward chord sequence this is not.

While this tugging interplay between two different keys goes against the grain, for the feelings that Wilson was attempting to evoke, it works perfectly.

The uncertain 'home' matches the verse’s vulnerable and exposed lyric, before eventually settling into a more resolute tonal structure to marry with the song’s central refrain. Its chords are part and parcel of why the song communicates its wealth of emotional colour so well.

This tussle between keys is stretched to breaking point during the song’s bridge section, which goes for a psychedelic stroll using chords from both keys, and eventually modulates back to the refrain (albeit transposed up).

The track’s constantly moving bass - avoiding the root notes altogether and instead picking out 3rd and 5th notes is another aspect that makes it, well, just magic.

God Only Knows is a deeply rich work of genius. Wilson is mindful of the jarring distinction between keys, and capitalises on that conflict (and the expectation it creates in the listener’s ear) to aid in the delivery of the song.

Life on Mars? - David Bowie

Life on Mars? - David Bowie

Bowie’s 1971 songwriting feat was ahead of its time for many reasons, but the dramatic lurch into Life on Mars' cinematic chorus is something that, even the great prog overlord Rick Wakeman, was blown away by.

“He would lead you down the garden path with quite a bog standard chord structure and then suddenly go AWOL,” said Wakeman in the BBC’s Five Years documentary.

Rick was enlisted to play the piano on Bowie’s soaring, My Way-evoking epic back in 1971, and was taken aback by many of the musical choices within David’s majestic idea.

While the verse follows a fairly conventional F Major chord progression (deliberately aping the chord sequence of Frank Sinatra’s signature number), the swing into the pre-chorus section marks a surprising transition away, pivoting towards an entirely new key - Bb major. It becomes the dominant key of the chorus.

“The thing that makes it really clever is that he puts an Eb in the bass which gives it a bass part that you can start to move on - real clever” Wakeman said.

The chromatic bass part which moves up the scale from Eb to E to F and Gb, is a classic example of a ‘line cliche', which adds a sense of movement to a chord progression, giving the listener a feeling of travelling towards an inevitable destination - in this case that huge, monumental chorus.

Mention must also be made of Mick Ronson's stunning string arrangement which does much to lift the song even further into the stratosphere. Astoundingly, it was the first string arrangement the Hull-originating guitarist ever wrote.

It all adds up to one of Bowie’s finest ever songs, and an early example of his surprising - but never boring - musical choices. (see also: Space Oddity).

Josie - Steely Dan

Josie - Steely Dan

Despite being hailed at the time as one of Steely Dan’s most accessible singles, 1977’s Josie is nothing short of a showcase for Walter Becker, Donald Fagen and co’s immense musical dexterity, and their penchant for picking up flavours from the outer reaches of the theory ocean to add prisms of flashing colour to their songs.

The basic structure of the funktastic, vampy verse orients around a relentless E minor7 chord over several bars, before quickly transitioning to some lush bar-resetting-chords. The A/D, G/C, D/G, C/F sequence punctuates the end of the first verse, and are played as sparkling sus2 major 7ths.

The second time around, A/D is omitted, and the remaining chords are played quicker, on the beat. During the ‘When Josie comes home’ part comes in, the chords push upwards (D/G, E/A). It's the sound of a musically fluent band, clearly having a lot of fun keeping things different each time around.

Though the basic vibe of the song keeps its gravitational pull towards that Em key, the open chords and inconsistent deployment of chords pivot the feel of this song into an entirely alien domain, and many of the ornamentation borrows from the Phrygian mode.

The result is a song that sounds wholly unique and ever-shifting - yet is simultaneously a relentless earworm.

It's an example of a perfect balance between consistency (that springy Eminor7) and the unexpected, unexplored reaches of chordal colouration.

Also, that bass-line slaps. Hard. Hats off to Chuck Rainey.

The song is presaged by a peculiar guitar riff that sets the scene for some of its theoretical weirdness, leaping from an E to D note up to an F# power chord which doesn’t relate to the original key in any way. Rick Beato has described it as the weirdest intro of all time. Beato said, “It doesn’t really relate, but it sounds cool.”

Sail to the Moon - Radiohead

Sail to the Moon - Radiohead

While there’s a great number of Radiohead songs that could be on this list (the aggressive descent into fuzz-soaked riffery during Paranoid Android, the odd meter of Present Tense, or the just downright weirdness of much of King of Limbs) Sail to the Moon from 2003’s Hail to the Thief might just be the most flagrant disregard of music theory on Radiohead's rap sheet - and yet, is an absolute jewel. It's an underrated highpoint on their most politically-charged record to date.

The song is built around a relatively simple, haunting Amaj7, Cmaj7, Fmaj7 chord pattern. It's a motif that blends two different keys (A major and A minor), but the most transgressive violation of the music theory rulebook lay in how the song’s time signature re-calibrates itself near-constantly during its run-time.

The very first time we hear the chord sequence, the Amaj7 and Fmaj 7 are in 7/4, while the Cmaj7 is in 2/4. The next time we hear it, the surrounding chords are in 6/4, the next it’s in 5/4, then 4/4 for the verse part. Then the key begins to conform to Am. All is calm - but it doesn't last.

Time signature weirdness rears its head throughout the track, and chords that interplay with both A major and minor keys interweave in an uncertain dance.

This bizarre decision to write a song this way sounds complex (and by all accounts, it was a nightmare to record) yet the result it a stunning piece that beautifully evokes the tumultuous uncertainty of being adrift on an ever-changing, choppy sea.

Jonny Greenwood recalled in a Spin magazine interview in 2003, that, “[Initially] Sail to the Moon wasn't very well-written, and it had different chords and only half an idea. It only came together after the whole band worked on it and figured out how the structures should be, and Phil had some insight on how the song could be arranged. And then it became just about the best song on the record.”

Bohemian Rhapsody - Queen

Bohemian Rhapsody - Queen

It had to be here didn’t it - Queen's signature monolith is a glorious Frankenstein’s monster of musical and theoretical approaches, galavanting across at least four distinct keys.

The piano-oriented verse part is in the key of Bb major while Brian May’s soaring guitar solo ascends into Eb major. The unusual ‘operatic’ part of the song (signifying the protagonist's descent into hell) is rooted in A major, and the grand finale modulates between Eb major, C minor, Eb major and, finally, F major.

It's a thrill-ride ride of a piece of music, gliding from calm, piano-centered tranquility to fiery expulsions of hard rock savagery. But you don't need us to tell you that - you've likely heard it a great deal.

But can you imagine listening to it for the very first time?

While dramatic shifts and transitions are often warned against when songwriting, Bohemian Rhapsody is the grandaddy of exceptions to the rule.

Unlike a lot of then contemporary prog rock, which also played fast and loose with keys, modes and time signatures, Queen’s mock-opera did astonishingly well in the charts. Rather than trying to subtly lead the listener into new keys or forms, the deliberately baroque, 1975 epic underlines its hard shifts via dramatic, eccentric performances and very clearly distinct sections. It helps that each section is self-contained and works well (theoretically speaking) within in its own confines.

Brian May puts down Bo Rap's runaway success and enduring legacy as being based on the purity and authenticity of its origins; “I think it has a deep authenticity on so many levels. It’s not something trying to be clever; it’s not something which was assembled from non-intersecting places; it was one concept, even though it’s very complex, it was very much in Freddie’s head at the time, telling a story, and it had the benefit of us as a production or collaboration at our peak,” May told the Library of Congress.

Radiohead’s Colin Greenwood has been talking about the differing guitar styles of two musicians whose styles he knows inside out – frontman Thom Yorke and his brother Jonny Greenwood.

In a new interview with Rolling Stone’s Brian Hiatt, the bassist has compared their two contrasting styles and has given Yorke – not generally noted as a guitarist per se – a seriously large compliment. “(Thom) takes it very seriously,” he said. “He's probably, for my money, one of the finest guitarists in the world.

“He's one of the best guitarists I know, like rhythm guitarists, because of the way he plays the guitar. The way he rolls with his shoulders when he plays, it's sort of (the guitar) part of his body. He's just incredibly physically connected, and always (has) been.”

Hiatt mentions that Jonny Greenwood, on the other hand, has a more “cerebral” approach to guitar, to which the bassist replies, “Yeah, I agree. They're very different, how they work, which is probably why they complement each other so well.”

Colin – currently playing as part of Nick Cave and Bad Seeds - then let slip a family secret: “(Jonny's) first record was Cool For Cats by Squeeze on pink vinyl that my mother threw away because she thought it was obscene,” he recalls when reflecting on how his brother developed his own playing style. “But he listened to anything, and I think he learned guitar by (listening to) the Pixies and Lou Reed's album New York.”

“Then he was in the Thames Vale Youth Orchestra playing the viola, which I always forget because I don't know how many times he went. So you know, he's one of these people who can just pick anything up and make something cool out of it.”

In the interview Greenwood also gave us an insight into how their mother regarded her sons’ music: “She used to call our music ‘bompity bomp music,'” he says. “And then when we started doing more electronic stuff, she used to call it ‘blippity blop.’ That’s actually quite an accurate description of the creative arc of Radiohead — from bompity bomp to blippity blop. But she sort of missed out on the nuances and the fusion of traditional music with electronic sounds. I wonder what she’d call that, bompity blop or something. She was actually very supportive in her own way. She gave me the money to buy my first guitar. Bless her.”

And as for the $64 million dollar of when we might expect some new Radiohead activity, Greenwood wouldn’t be drawn: “Genuinely, I've been so focused on Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds for the last two months. I don't know what plans are afoot in Radiohead land.”

Thom Yorke has confronted a protester at a show on his current solo tour of Australia and Asia.

The incident happened last night (October 30) at a gig in Melbourne. Yorke was playing Karma Police as his final song when there was an interruption by someone yelling in the audience. As you can hear from the phone footage taken below, it’s unclear what exactly was said. According to some reports, the protester yelled: “How many dead children will it take for you to condemn the genocide in Gaza?"

Whatever it was, Yorke heard it and took umbrage. “Come up and say that. Right here,” he said in response. “Come up on the fucking stage and say what you want to say. But don’t stand there like a coward, come here and say it. Come on.”

“You want to piss on everybody’s night? Come on. OK, you do. See you later then,” he said before abruptly putting down his guitar and exiting the stage.

Commenters on a Reddit page later confirmed that Yorke did indeed return and finish his set: “Us general admission schmos were cheering and clapping for him to come back. Thom went out of his way to thank us on the grass (after the show)”.

Although Yorke has been vocal about a number of causes down the years, on the Gaza conflict he has not made any public statement. Back in 2017, Radiohead faced a backlash when they played a show in Tel Aviv.

At the time a group called Radiohead Fans For Palestine penned an open letter to Yorke, which said: “It is the Palestinian people who have asked you to boycott and if you’re going to justify your show in Tel Aviv it is them you should be addressing.”

Yorke then issued a reply which pointed out: “Playing in a country isn’t the same as endorsing its government. We don’t endorse (Israeli prime minister Benjamin) Netanyahu any more than Trump.”

It’s become increasingly clear that the Israel-Palestine conflict represents choppy waters for many so-called ‘progressive’ artists. The cultural boycott that the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement has attempted to put in place has – so far – not been as all-encompassing as it was in the 1970s and '80s against South Africa.

Some acts like Radiohead and Nick Cave have chosen to break it, arguing that engaging with their Israeli fans is not tantamount to endorsing the current Israeli government. Others like Elvis Costello, Lorde and Lana Del Rey have been persuaded to cancel appearances in Israel by the backlash they’ve faced.

Either way, Yorke will surely not be the last artist to find themselves impaled on the horns of this seemingly intractable issue.

As speculation amongst Radiohead fans grows about their future plans – whether their rehearsal this summer might be the prelude for a tour, a new album next year etc etc – two band members have reacted in their own inimitable ways.

In an interview with NME to promote his photo book How To Disappear, nice Colin Greenwood remarked that the rehearsals were “really fun and amicable” and that: “It was great, but beyond that get-together, I’m sure we’ll get together and make plans – but for what, I don’t know.”

Meanwhile frontman Thom Yorke – as is his wont - immediately threw a bucket of cold water over the idea that the rehearsal could presage any new Radiohead activity. Interviewed by Australian radio station Double J about the reunion speculation, Yorke said: "I am not aware of it and don't really give a flying f***."

He added: "No offence to anyone and er, thanks for caring.

"But I think we’ve earned the right to do what makes sense to us without having to explain ourselves or be answerable to anyone else’s historical idea of what we should be doing.”

In other words, don’t get yer’ hopes up.

In any case, as Greenwood explained in his interview, the respective band members are all busy on their own projects at present. The bassist is about to go on tour with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, his brother, guitarist Jonny and Yorke are busy with The Smile – they’ve recently released their third album Cutouts - and Ed O’Brien is currently working on a new solo album that should see light of day in 2025.

Greenwood did admit that the band were in a fortunate position. Whilst their 90s contemporaries are all at various stages of becoming fossilised heritage acts, Radiohead’s best days may yet lie ahead.

“I was talking to Nick (Cave) about this (…and) he was saying that Radiohead would be in a position to go and do whatever we wanted in terms of when we play, what we play and how we play.”

“There’s a freedom that we have that we should appreciate,” he added. “It’s not like we’ve reached a point where people are only interested in listening to something from the first three albums. I think we’re still a band where people might want to know what might happen next. We’re very lucky to have that.”

Jonny Greenwood has put the dampener on the idea that a new Radiohead album or tour might appear any time soon by saying the band has “no plans” for 2025.

It was revealed not so long back – by his brother Colin – that the group had met up and rehearsed over the summer. This raised hopes that there might be some Radiohead activity on the horizon.

However, in an interview with NME, Jonny said that whilst the brief reunion had been “fun and natural”, there was nothing pencilled in for next year and that the respective members all had their own stuff going on for the time being: “we’ve lots of individual projects going on at the moment.”

For the guitarist and Thom Yorke this means The Smile, the project that released its third album Cutouts last week. It’s a quick follow up to Wall Of Eyes, which the group released back in January.

Meanwhile, his brother Colin is part of touring band for Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and is about to set out on a global jaunt in support of the acclaimed Wild God album. He also has a new photo book, How To Disappear, coming out, featuring plenty of snaps of his brother and the other Radiohead members taken over the years.

Talking about his bro’s project, Jonny said: “I’ve pulled the same stupid face – one of panic/alarm – in 99 per cent of photos he’s taken of me over the years. So he just has lots of those. He could easily do a whole excruciating exhibit of that face. Luckily, he has hundreds of actually great photos (mostly not of his idiot brother) – and the book is brilliant. It shows how it really is to be in a band.”

Meanwhile Radiohead’s other guitarist Ed O’Brien has been working on a new solo album, a follow up to 2020’s Earth and Thom Yorke has adapted a new version of Radiohead’s 2003 album Hail To The Thief for a new production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet that will premiere in Manchester in April 2025.

So in other words there’s loads of Radiohead activity going on next year, it’s just not happening collectively.

Good news for Radiohead fans – the band have been rehearsing together, according to bassist Colin Greenwood, anyway.

Greenwood spilled the beans at a virtual event for Hay Festival Queretaro on Sunday. He was talking about his upcoming photography book How To Disappear: A Photographic Portrait of Radiohead and revealed that the band met up a couple of months back.

“We did some rehearsals about two months ago in London, just to play the old songs,” he said when the conversation turned to the band. “And it was really fun, we had a really good time.”

The news will come as some relief to fans, who may have been despairing about band ever re-constituting itself. Radiohead’s last album A Moon Shaped Pool came out in 2016 and since they finished touring that record in 2018 there has been no suggestion that any new music from the band would be forthcoming any time soon.

Since then Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood have been busy with The Smile, their project with Sons Of Kemet drummer Tom Skinner – they release a third album Cutouts next month. 

Ed O’Brien has another solo record coming out and aside from his photography Colin Greenwood himself is currently playing bass with Nick Cave.

Earlier in the year Jonny Greenwood confirmed that the band were still in regular contact. “We’re still talking all the time, we just need to make a plan and get some time together sorted out in advance,” the guitarist said in an interview with the Guardian. “I’ve never been very good at that. Too busy dicking around in this studio.”

In contrast to the ongoing fraternal psychodrama that is their 90s contemporaries Oasis, Radiohead seem to approach being in a band in their 50s in distinctly grown-up, dare we say, middle-class manner. 

In a 2020 interview with NME, Ed O’Brien revealed how things work on Planet Radiohead: “We’re an ongoing band and have online meetings – there was a Zoom call recently. We’re talking about stuff, but for the foreseeable future everyone is doing their own thing. 

"When it feels right to plug back into Radiohead, then we will.”

And by the sounds of it, that time is coming soon.

Colin Greenwood’s book How To Disappear: A Photographic Portrait Of Radiohead comes out on October 15

Jonny Greenwood, Radiohead and The Smile's resident musical polymath, has been detailing another current project and preoccupation - touring Italy, documenting and playing historic church organs.

On his own Grand Tour, Greenwood inspected and played multiple pre-modern instruments, and found them to be inspiringly various in approach and features. “Just looking around those Italian churches," he told The Guardian, "you saw organs that summon up remarkable histories.

"One church in Comunanza, near the Sibillini mountains, has an organ with a little water tank that enables the organist to make this burbling noise that imitates birdsong. There was another church where Mozart is supposed to have visited and played the organ, so we were all rubbing the keys excitedly!

"Every church organ on Earth will have years of history embedded in it.”

“I was able to actually play some of these amazing medieval instruments. The internal parts – what they call the brain – are incredibly complex pieces of technology.

"These huge machines, created centuries ago, were tackling the same challenges of synthesis and sampling and sound reproduction that we struggle with today.”

Now, Greenwood's organ odyssey has inspired an eight-hour, drone-dominated ambient score that's receiving its debut in the UK next week. The Norfolk & Norwich festival will host a performance of the piece, called 268 Years of Reverb, by two organists playing in shifts.

The name of the piece at any given recital is actually dictated by the age of the church in which it's performed, in this case, Norwich's Octagon Chapel. “The organ is the lungs and voice of any building where it is installed," he told the festival website.

"In an old church, air is going through the same organ pipes, in the same space, that other listeners have experienced for centuries. So, hearing church organs is a kind of time travel, the closest we have to faithfully reproducing ancient sound."

Of course, that's only one strand of Greenwood's restless musical, performance and production thinking. In less esoteric mode, he also says “I think a lot about that Sex Pistols album, Never Mind the Bollocks. How carefully it was recorded, how precisely it was arranged. {Producer] Chris Thomas was obsessed with placing mics in the right place, recording cleanly, and getting the band constantly to keep their instruments in tune."

It's a sentiment we feel the sadly departed Steve Albini might agree with: "Even something that is supposed to be the embodiment of heads-down rock’n’roll is actually something incredibly precise.”

Back in the mainstream, Greenwood also gave a brief status update on the activities of Radiohead's ever-busy diaspora. "he Smile are on tour, Ed is making another solo record, Colin is playing bass with Nick Cave... so lots of music is being made, just not as Radiohead.

"We’re still talking all the time, we just need to make a plan and get some time together sorted out in advance. I’ve never been very good at that.

"Too busy dicking around in this studio.”

We empathise.

For more information on 268 Years of Reverb, see The Norfolk & Norwich festival.

When Radiohead were laying down tracks for their second long player, The Bends, throughout 1994, there was no doubting they were under pressure. The group’s record label, Parlophone, was desperate to capitalise on the mainstream radio play and consequent chart success the single Creep [taken from their debut Pablo Honey, 1993] had garnered worldwide. In retrospect, Parlophone needn’t have worried.

The Bends, finally unveiled to the world in March 1995, established Radiohead as a supreme alt-rock force that would be set on the path to global domination with 1997’s more experimental opus OK Computer.

While nearly every track on The Bends is a classic, Fake Plastic Trees (the third single taken from the UK No 4 album) is the intimate, emotionally charged centrepiece. Producer John Leckie [Stone Roses, The Verve] was personally chosen by the band to work on their sophomore release, and he recognised the song’s potential from the start.

“There was a demo of [Fake Plastic Trees] on a cassette and that’s when I first heard the track,” Leckie explained to Total Guitar magazine in 2012. “There were so many demos that sounded like major songs, but that one was near the top of the list. It sounded instantly like a big track.”

The song was laid down at London’s RAK Studios in early 1994, during an initial seven-week recording residency. While some tracks from The Bends would later be re-recorded with Leckie at The Manor and Abbey Road, after the band decided they wanted to work on alternative arrangements following a short global gigging jaunt, Fake Plastic Trees would remain as it was first captured in RAK Studio 1. 

The atmosphere was intimate from the outset as vocalist/guitarist Thom Yorke donned his acoustic and Leckie pressed record on the tape machine.

“It was originally done with Thom just playing acoustic guitar and singing live,” Leckie remembers of that soulful first take. “I think he did it to a click in his headphones, but everything else was overdubbed later. One of the reasons for doing that was because we were recording the strings the next day.

“Jonny Greenwood [guitarist, keyboardist] had written some string parts for Fake Plastic Trees, (Nice Dream), and maybe another track. They wanted a cello player and I knew this girl called Caroline Lavelle who worked with a string quartet. She was coming down to record with Jonny’s friend [John Matthias] who was playing violin. Anyway, we wanted to get a track down of Fake Plastic Trees and Thom said, ‘I’ll do it now!’” Leckie was amazed by Yorke’s prodigious abilities. “I won’t say he did it first take, but he did it second or third take. The whole track dynamic was created from Thom’s original performance.”

Leckie recorded Yorke’s acoustic with a combination of two microphones: a Shure SM57 and one Neumann U 67. However, he can’t quite recall the make of the acoustic guitar.

“It was blonde wood. It was very resonant and a bit precious to him,” says Leckie. “It was almost like a classical instrument – it wasn’t like a Martin folk guitar or anything like that.”https://www.musicradar.com/news/marshall-vintage-reissue-pedalsAs far as the overdubs go, Greenwood took an entire day to meticulously record the Hammond organ sequences phrase-by-phrase, while both Ed O’Brien [guitarist] and Greenwood both contributed parts to the electric guitar break.

“I don’t think there were many guitar effects, so I think most of it was just clean or dirty. Jonny had a Fender amp, maybe a Fender Twin, and a Marshall Bluesbreaker [Greenwood had previously used a Shredmaster on Creep]. We tried lots of different amps and stuff during the album sessions, but basically his sound was his Telecaster [Plus model], a Fender amp and his best-sounding pedal the Bluesbreaker. 

"Ed’s guitars were custom made by the band’s guitar tech, Plank (who still works for them, I think). He made a red guitar that looks like a Rickenbacker and Ed used that a lot of the time.”

Leckie will never forget the live feel and adrenaline the band channelled into the sessions for Fake Plastic Trees and The Bends.

“What I remember the most about Radiohead is that when they performed in the studio they would jump around as if they were onstage,” an incredulous Leckie recalls. “So when Jonny was doing an overdub his hair would be hanging forward and he’d be knocking chairs over. Thom would be the same. As soon as you pressed record, they’d all start jumping up and down. It was really good fun.”

Although Leckie produced The Bends, Parlophone drafted in American duo Sean Slade and Paul Q Kolderie (who’d produced Radiohead’s debut album Pablo Honey) to mix a few of the tracks at a late stage in proceedings. Even though Leckie was irritated initially by the move, he does admit that the end result on Fake Plastic Trees isn’t too far removed from his original monitor mix. 

Looking back, his stand-out memory will always be Thom’s intense emotional vocal delivery while strumming his acoustic on that first take at RAK. “You can’t delay the emotion that Thom had playing on that track,” Leckie says. “It was right to put that in at the beginning and then have everything else built around it. You know, rather than putting it on at the end and then Thom having to accommodate all the other shit around it. To start off with something naked like that was a great way of crafting that song. It was brilliant.”

• "It was a dark place, and we realised we didn't want to go back there": is Radiohead's King Of Limbs not just their most underrated record, but the one that helped save them?

It's hard to imagine what it's like inside the eye of the Radiohead creative process; it evolves, it mutates… the band wilfully questions and reconfigures their comfort zones and roles. They are the definition of what a progressive band should be in many ways, And it gets results, mostly. 

Few would name their eighth album, The King Of Limbs, as a top three, even five, Radiohead album, but in a 2021 video interview with The Coda Collection's Greg Kot, producer Nigel Godrich was able to give us an insider's perspective on the way Radiohead worked on the material with him. And elsewhere, archive interviews with Radiohead themselves reveal the album as part of a much bigger arc. One that was possibly essential to their survival as a band.  

"The record is really interesting because the instigation of a lot of the music is through mechanised things and that's a very, very important part of the creative process," Godrich said. "I think that people's criticisms of it initially, which were fair enough, were that it didn't feel like a band."

In that sense, it feels like the spiritual successor to Kid A a decade before, only with the integration of electronic equipment and the layered sound manipulation it offered taken further. Too far for some.

The band pushed forward with the use of looping and intricate rhythmic interplay on the record, with the musicians encouraging each other to explore new possibilities with gear they had "no idea" how to use. 

"We had an initial session of five weeks, and it was really like the kids in the kindergarten," guitarist Ed O'Brien told NPR. "It's really interesting because what it forces you to do is you had to simplify what you were doing, you couldn't do loads of ideas. Probably one of the most important things is you had to listen to one another. Believe it or not that's also something in a band that you can lose – you can get so wrapped up in what you're doing, you're not listening to what other people are doing. So Nigel was very keen that we start listening to one another, and it kind of helps when you make a record believe it or not."

"Yeah, I mean, it was an experiment," added Thom Yorke in the same chat. "I didn't think we really genuinely thought anything would come out of it, certainly not an entire record."

Opener Bloom's layered drums and bass elements revealed the results of Radiohead's new approaches. "Almost every tune is like a collage," Thom Yorke explained to NPR. "Tthings we'd pre-recorded, each of us, and then were flying at each other. You get to a point where you think, 'OK, this bit needs a big black line through it.' It's like editing a film or something. It was interesting – the melodies were there but so much was implied so when you did embellish it, it was like, woah. It would really come out of itself." 

Godrich's role cannot be overstated – his work with Radiohead on every record since 1995's The Bends (where he engineered alongside producer John Leckie) has seen him hailed as a sixth member. And the band concurs.

"I'd say there's seven members of the band – there's him and there's also [artist and Yorke's old college friend] Stanley Donwood," Thom Yorke reflected to Austin City Limits. "Basically, the most fun we ever have is when we're all together doing music… getting messed up and having a good time. That's the best and it's always been like that.

"What Nigel brings to it is basically the mirror to what we're doing," added Yorke. "Sometimes he'll say he doesn't get something so we have to force him through it, or sometimes he's right… you have to have someone on the other end of the speakers. 

"You can't be both heads – it's impossible. But we've kind of grown up together, and maybe for other people that might be a bad thing but actually for us it's a good thing because none of us is really thinking how wonderful we are. Everyone is trying to search for something new all the time – including Nigel. It's the best thing for all of us, I think."

While it may not have a high count of live fan-favourites in terms of songs compared to other records (Bloom is the most performed track from the album with 136 appearances in their live setlist, but is still only their 40th most played song), the relative scarcity of its material's performances could be down to the rhythmic demands of some of The King Of Limbs material.

It saw the band bring in a second live drummer, Clive Deamer (Portishead), during 2011. This delivered what drummer Phillip Selway described as some of the "push-and-pull" required to deliver Radiohead's most rhythmically ambitious material live with one drummer playing traditionally, and the other "almost mimicked a drum machine".

The record's use of samples and loops presented live performance challenges elsewhere, like the period following Kid A had done, too. 

"We didn't have a clue how we were going to play a lot of it," Yorke admitted to NPR. "And then, like, learning to play it allows you to back into it in another way as well, especially after the initial sort of, 'What the hell is that thing?'

"So, I mean, and in some ways that's one of the ways we move on musically. It's quite interesting, like, having to force ourselves to learn this thing. It's like a backwards process but it really exists then in another way."

There's no better insight into the new life The King Of Limb's songs would find in the live environment than when Radiohead appeared on Godrich's own From The Basement series. The band, including Deamer, performed the album's eight tracks, as well as the songs Staircase and The Daily Mail that were released as a separate double A-sides, likewise the song Supercollider (released with The Butcher). 

The hour-long performance doesn't just showcase of the musicianship that defines Radiohead's reputation as one of rock's most beguiling live acts, it elevates the King Of Limbs material with a new urgency and emotional impact. 

Radiohead tackle the challenges of performing the material headlong – on a stunning performance of opener Bloom, Selway, Deamer and Greenwood are on drums. By this point the Electro-Harmonix Hog Octave Generator had become a key part of Greenwood's guitar rig, and used as a vital element of the song Separator. 

"The whole kind of arc and the way everything worked was perfect because they went away and worked out how to play it, took it on tour for a bit and then we could go back in a room and play it," Godrich told The Coda Collective. "So to capture that band version of it… I think it was a really great way of doing it actually. And also reflected very well on the show, From The Basement, because it really showed the strength of that."

The brevity of the recorded album and the need to play a longer set Basement show actually prompted the recording release of The Daily Mail and Staircase, too. One argument amongst fans is that The King Of Limbs would have been enhanced with those songs in the tracklisting (or even other 2011 double A-side Supercollider / The Butcher) but they simply weren't finished until after the album was recorded. 

"We got Staircase together, which was a song that we jammed and worked out during King Of Limbs but we didn't take it from its basic stages and develop it into a full-blown song," Ed O'Brien told Reactor FM in 2012.  "The Daily Mail is a song we had kicking around since 2005, and it hadn't worked for whatever reason, and then literally within ten minutes that song was worked [out]." Instead, all four songs remain strong outsiders – akin to the work The Beatles would leave off their albums. 

The idea that The King Of Limbs is Radiohead's 'weakest' album is obviously subjective and relative, then, reminding us of the standards the band set themselves and our own expectations of them. Moreover, the album was part of Radiohead's salvation - the sight of Thom Yorke dancing while wearing a bowler hat in the Lotus Flower video may have been jarring for those who didn't realise the band had a lighter, more carefree side, but inside the band the changes on that side of things had been much deeper.   

"We always keep moving," O'Brien told Mexico's Reactor FM while on tour in 2012, "and I think what happened was, with OK Computer we entered this quite dark space, this quite dark era – it was like being in a tunnel. And we were in that tunnel for OK Computer, Amnesiac, Hail To The Thief... we thought we were out but we weren't, and [for] In Rainbows part of the struggle was getting out of the tunnel. 

"Once we released the album we felt like we were out of that tunnel, and it was dark – it was a dark place, and we realised we didn't want to go back there, because we'd been there a long time and it can be very, very creative, but it kills you as a person. It's very hard. It takes it out of you. It's not a good place to be, and musically it gets boring as well because you make a certain type of music. We are now in a much lighter place. It's different and it's flowing."

In this context, the making and touring of The King Of Limbs were crucial to the transition required for Radiohead to continue as a band.

"In order to be where we are now, we could have only been in the darkness [to] appreciate it," O'Brien said. "So this is like a new era of Radiohead, and it has been for probably the last two years or so."

This was the start of Radiohead Mark 3. "Mark 1 was Pablo Honey to OK Computer," explained O'Brien in the same interview. "Mark 2 was Kid A through to the recording of In Rainbows. And then Mark 3 has been a transition the last two years from where we were in Mark 2, and now we're not in the heart of it but it's about love - it's about joy and love and lightness. And that's where we are in Radiohead Mark 3."

• “There were so many demos that sounded like major songs, but that one was near the top of the list": The making of the 1995 Radiohead classic that became one of their all-time greatest anthems

Despite being released over two decades ago, Daft Punk's Face to Face remains something of an obsession for producers and samplists. 

Last year, we reported that Daft Punk collaborator Todd Edwards had revealed the source of a number of samples used on the track, much to the delight of the duo's sample-sleuthing fans, many of whom have attempted to recreate the song by tracking down and piecing together the original samples in their DAWs.

Producer and YouTuber Nickster has taken things a step further by remaking Face to Face using a completely different set of samples from the original track. Where Face to Face uses samples of 20 different songs from 1968-1982, Nickster's re-do aims to recreate the track using newer samples from a later time period of 1998-2012, creating a new backing track for Todd Edwards' original vocals.

By carefully selecting, processing and arranging similar samples from different songs, he's managed to make a convincing reproduction that, while it doesn't sound exactly alike, offers a fresh take on Daft Punk's original. The remake features samples from Radiohead's Weird Fishes/Arpeggi, Red Hot Chili Peppers' Can't Stop, and Lady Gaga's Poker Face, among others.

Commenters praised Nickster's ingenuity and production skills, with one describing the track as a "love letter to sampling". "People don’t understand the immense difficulty of finding completely different songs with the same sound and vibe as the original," said another. "Seriously insane man, hats off to you for the achievement".

Nickster has generously provided a download link for his Ableton set in the video's comments, so if you're curious to find out how he pieced the track together, you'll be able to download and explore.

Subscribe to Nickster on YouTube.

Very few bands in recent decades have inspired such reverence and respect as Radiohead. Over the course of nine studio albums, the Oxfordshire five-piece have built a reputation on breaking new creative ground, challenging preconceptions while forging music of real integrity and intent.

It’s not always been a smooth trajectory, a notion borne out by the release of their fourth album Kid A in 2000, a work that left many diehard fans feeling bewildered and bereft. After the critical and commercial success of OK Computer (1997) hopes had been high for the new album. Months before its release, Pat Blashill of Melody Maker echoed the thoughts of many when he wrote "If there's one band that promises to return rock to us, it's Radiohead."

It wasn’t to be. The album that emerged was light years away from rock. Gone were the guitar-driven baroque anthems, and the searing, visceral strains of Jonny Greenwood’s Telecaster. Instead, Kid A was a record defined by the sounds and textures of electronica, free jazz, and modular synths. 

Just as Thom Yorke would reimagine his entire creative process, so too would Radiohead redefine the role of the guitar within their new sound. This is where guitarist Ed O’Brien emerged as an innovative source. His sound and technique would play a pivotal role in Radiohead’s bold new sonic journey. 

By the time work began on Kid A in January 1999, Radiohead had been touring almost relentlessly for almost eight years and by their own admission, were burnt out. Thom Yorke had become ill, describing himself as “a complete fucking mess… completely unhinged”. 

He was also suffering from writer’s block and unable to finish songs on the guitar. Yorke was completely disillusioned with rock music and began listening almost exclusively to the electronica artists signed to Warp Records, such as Aphex Twin and Autechre. 

"It was refreshing because the music was all structures and had no human voices in it,” he told The Guardian in September 2000. “But I felt just as emotional about it as I'd ever felt about guitar music." 

Yorke liked the idea of his voice being used as an instrument rather than having a leading role, and wanted to focus on sounds and textures instead of traditional songwriting. This was the direction that would inform Kid A.

Sessions began in January 1999 at Guillame Tell Studios in Paris, before the band moved in March to Medley Studios in Copenhagen for two unproductive weeks. In April, Radiohead began recording in a mansion in Batsford Park, Gloucestershire. The lack of deadline and the number of incomplete ideas made it hard to focus and the group held tense meetings. They agreed to disband if they could not create an album they all believed in. 

In September 1999, the band relocated to their own newly-built studio in Oxfordshire in September 1999. 

The producer they chose for the new album was Nigel Godrich, who had been at the helm of OK Computer. Yorke still only had fragments of songs, just sounds or rhythms, and no verses, choruses or lyrics to speak of. His plan was to record everything they played and then edit it, in the same way that Can had done in the late '60s and '70s at their studio in Cologne.  

For the rest of the band, the challenge was finding their place in this new uncharted landscape. Bassist Colin Greenwood confessed to writer Nick Kent that he found the Warp influences “really cold”, while Ed O’Brien said: "It's scary – everyone feels insecure. I'm a guitarist and suddenly it's like, well, there are no guitars on this track, or no drums." 

But Kid A would be the album that opened up a whole new vista for Ed O’Brien. While Jonny Greenwood, immersed himself in acquiring and learning the Ondes Martenot – an electronic instrument invented in 1928, which produces wavering sounds similar to a theremin – O’Brien experimented with guitar sounds that enhanced the band’s new sonic template. 

O’Brien had traditionally played a support role to the stunning lead work of Jonny Greenwood and the riffs and rhythmic work of Yorke. But the ambient sounds and textures O’Brien created on guitar have been integral in giving the Radiohead sound its layers of complexity.

On The Bends and OK Computer, O’Brien had used an EBow, which was fundamental in creating long drone-like sustained notes. He also used a Boss DD-5 pedal, which he described as “key to the sound of The Bends and OK Computer ... It's the only delay that can make those OK Computer sounds.”

On Kid A, O’Brien took this sustain to a whole new level. O’Brien’s main guitar since 1996 had been an Eric Clapton Strat. In early 2000, he contacted Michael Brook, creator of the Infinite Guitar, who suggested that O’Brien should use sustain units and pickups on his guitar, to sustain notes indefinitely. “He directed me towards Fernandes, who had the Sustainer,” O’Brien told MusicRadar in 2017. “I had a Clapton Strat from the mid-’90s, and we put the Sustainer unit in there, and that’s when we started using it.”

O’Brien combined the Fernandes Sustainer with looping and delay effects to create synth-like sounds. It's these long drawn-out sounds that can be heard beneath the swells and structure of songs such as Kid A. The Fernandes Sustainer system would go on to become a defining onboard feature of O’Brien’s signature model EOB Stratocaster in 2017. 

Towards the end of 1999 the band were starting to make progress. “Start working on a band loop called ‘fast track’,” wrote O’Brien in his online diary, on 6 October 1999. “Thom had a rough arrangement on Cubase last night. Nige and I then do some guitar sounds using my new toy – the first Roland guitar synth, which sounds pretty different.” 

One day later, he was similarly upbeat: “Optimistic is possibly my favourite band song that is played together live in a room,” wrote O’Brien. “Sounds fucking great. We do about nine versions. In most there are some amazing moments. The penultimate take would seem to be the one.” 

With its staggered propulsive beat, and strident jagged guitar, Optimistic is the rockiest track and the only guitar-based song on the album. It’s a three guitar onslaught from Greenwood, O’Brien and Yorke. When the band showcased the track in their set for the first time, in Dublin on 7 October 2000, Greenwood was playing a vintage Fender Starcaster through Vox AC30TB Dave Petersen Special amplifier, with a Roland RE-201 Space Echo and Boss SD1 overdrive pedal.

By the dawn of the new millennium, six songs had been completed, including How To Disappear Completely, created in January 2000. It’s a haunting, melancholic track with soaring strings, arranged by Greenwood. Jonny Greenwood described the track Everything In Its Right Place as the real turning point for the album. "We knew it had to be the first song, and everything just followed after it,” he said.  

Although wholly invested in using synths, Cubase and Protools to write, Thom Yorke still contributed guitar, using the Lakewood M14 acoustic on How To Disappear Completely. On the Kid A album, Yorke also played his first true hollowbody electric guitar, a vintage Gibson ES-125. 

When Radiohead played the track live for the first time in October 2000, O’Brien used his Rickenbacker 360 12-string run through effects such as a Crowther Hotcake, DigiTech Whammy WH4 pitch shifter and his Boss DD-5 delay.  

The spooky, atmospheric ambient track Treefingers was created by processing guitar loops of O'Brien's random chords, while arpeggiated guitar lines and staccato notes pervade the dreamy imagery of In Limbo. The track features more syncopated, staccato guitar work from Jonny Greenwood, who is playing his late '70s Fender Starcaster with a Boss SD1 overdrive pedal and Roland RE201 Space Echo through his Vox AC30TB Dave Petersen Special amp. The band debuted the track on 13 June 2000 at the Theatre Antique in Arles, France. 

It’s difficult to overstate just how profoundly different Kid A was to everything Radiohead had released at that point. It was a gargantuan shift. It was released on 2 October 2000 and was one of the most eagerly anticipated albums of its era but even the more usually insightful critics loathed it. 

Alex Petridis of The Guardian described it as "self-consciously awkward and bloody-minded, the noise made by a band trying so hard to make a 'difficult' album that they felt it beneath them to write any songs".

Jim Irvin in Mojo concluded that "upon first listen, Kid A is just awful ... Too often it sounds like the fragments that they began the writing process with – a loop, a riff, a mumbled line of text, have been set in concrete and had other, lesser ideas piled on top."

Yorke recalled that the band were “white as a sheet” when it came to the prospect of playing the tracks from Kid A live. In June that year, Radiohead embarked on a tour of the Mediterranean, followed by some select dates across Europe, the UK, Ireland and the US. This was the first time that Radiohead used looping and live sampling on tour. This was made possible only by a host of performance-orientated samplers, such as the Korg Kaoss Pad, Line 6 DL4, and Akai Headrush looper pedal, all of which had been released only a year earlier in 1999. 

The 2000 tour was also the first time Ed O’Brien performed with a guitar modified to include a sustainer system. The heavily modified Eric Clapton Signature Stratocaster used for the Dublin show would become his go-to instrument for more than a decade and would become the inspiration for his Fender EOB Signature Stratocaster, launched in 2017.

As time went on, critics began to see greatness within the Kid A album, which reached No.1 on both sides of the Atlantic. “Get past the glitchiness and the occasional moments of discord,” wrote Phil Mongredien in The Guardian, “and here were songs as affecting and powerful as those on OK Computer, just framed somewhat differently.”

• 20 Radiohead guitar chords you need to know

While clocking up a hugely diverse catalogue of albums, Radiohead have retained a level of musicianship and melodic knowhow that’s ensured they’ve remained peerless throughout their lengthy career.

The band’s cunning use of passing notes, inversions and slash chords have built up a formidable library of voicings that will have you reassessing your approach to chordal playing, and are sure to inspire a new song or two.

Each and every one is catalogued in the exhaustive Radiohead Complete songbook, which features every song the band has ever officially released - right up to A Moon Shaped Pool, Spectre and OK Computer’s 20th Anniversary tracks. 

Before we dive in, we’ll point out that the voicings used are sometimes condensed versions of chords used by Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood and Ed O’Brien, and are designed to sound good on one guitar - and, of course, a few of these are piano transcribed to guitar, too.

So, without further ado, here are 20 of our favourite chords from the band’s extensive discography - read on and be inspired…

Radiohead Complete is published by Faber Music, and available to buy online.

1. Aadd#11

Song: Planet Telex
This chord, taken from The Bends’ opening track, appears at the end of each verse cycle, alternated with a regular A. It creates a sense of suspense in the build-up to the chorus.

2. Dmaj9/F#

Song: Fake Plastic Trees
An early example of Thom Yorke’s knack for freezing notes up top while changing the bass underneath, this one appears in the song’s verse, preceded by A.

3. B11/F#

Song: (Nice Dream)
Discordant and uneasy, this is one of (Nice Dream)’s closing chords - you’ll hear it on Thom’s fourth ‘nice dream’ in the final chorus. It showcases a cunning use of open strings to provide ambiguity.

4. Abmaj7

Song: Talk Show Host
On the track, this chord is arpeggiated on keyboard, but transcribed onto guitar (with the added Ab on the low E string), it makes for a beautiful voicing.

5. Dm6/9/A

Song: Airbag
This composite chord appears underneath Jonny Greenwood’s opening riff - shift it down a fret and it becomes a tasty A(add9).

6. Dm(add9)/F

Song: Paranoid Android
This sinister number is the middle chord of this OK Computer anthem’s chorus, sandwiched between a Gm6 and E7.

7. Aadd4/C#

Song: Let Down
The first chord from Let Down is a bit of a finger-twister. Change the top note from the 5th down to 0 then the 4th fret to replicate the fragile opening refrain.

8. Am(add9)

Song: Karma Police
In the song’s verses, every second Am is this fruity extended version.

9. Gm6

Song: No Surprises
Pair this with a D major chord and you’ve got the basis of the rhythm part for the song’s eerie main hook - this is also the chord you’ll need for the chorus of Paranoid Android.

10. Dbmaj7(#11)

Song: Everything In Its Right Place
Thom Yorke opens Kid A with a C before hitting this exotic number, then landing on a Cm/Eb.

11. E(add9)

Song: Pyramid Song
Halfway through the verse, Thom pulls out this dreamy add9 - it’s a beauty on guitar, too.

12. C(add4)/E

Song: 2 + 2 = 5
You’ll need to tune to drop D and get your arpeggiation on for this one, which follows a common-or-garden Fm in the track’s intro.

Pairing a ‘regular’ chord with something slightly more unnerving is a Radiohead trademark.

13. Cmaj9(#11)

Song: All I Need
You’ll find this chord in All I Need’s tumultuous outro, where the notes up top stay the same, and the lower C cycles to an E, then a G.

14. G#m(b6)

Song: Reckoner
After Thom sings ‘Because we separate like ripples on a blank shore’ (lovely line, that), you’ll hear this bona fide stunner. Good use of the open E string there.

15. Dm11

Song: Bloom
This chord is a smart amalgamation of Ed’s guitar playing on the track, as well as its background loops.

16. Cadd9#4

Song: Codex
You can just about make this out following the track’s third verse. Again, it’s a Thom-tinkling-ivories special transcribed to guitar, and it’s just lovely.

17. C(#9)

Song: The Daily Mail
More evidence of the brilliance of piano chords transcribed to guitar comes courtesy of The Daily Mail, of all things.

Slide that 3-2-0 up to 4-3-1 (keeping the Eb on the B string the same) for a Dbadd9, before resolving to a standard Eb barre, and you’ve got yourself half the chorus.

18. F#6/9

Song: Burn The Witch
There’s not much guitar on A Moon Shaped Pool’s opener, but you can console yourself with this outrageously ambiguous chord, composed of the string section’s opening stabs.

19. Fmaj13

Song: Daydreaming
The opening piano refrain of this one is proper jaw-dropping, as is this chord, which essentially takes an A(sus4) and sticks an F underneath. In fact, switch that lower F out for an A, and you’ve got the crux of Thom’s piano line.

20. Abmaj7(#11)

Song: True Love Waits
Radiohead songs don’t get much more beautiful than this. The second and third verses feature this melancholy heartstring-tugger, preceded by Cmaj7 and Am7.

Billed as "a collection of inspiring conversations about the beauty, brutality, discipline and technique of being a successful singer", Jason Thomas Gordon's The Singers Talk features interviews with some of music's best-known vocalists, including Bruce Springsteen, Ozzy Osborne and Chrissie Hynde. 

The book contains a wealth of fascinating insights into the careers of these gifted singers, but perhaps the most amusing anecdote arrives courtesy of Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke. In an excerpt published last week via Rolling Stone, Yorke reveals that he once had a minor freakout on stage after a mid-set puff on a Californian blunt proved a little stronger than expected. 

When asked about his most "embarrassing vocal mishap", Yorke sets the scene, describing a "great show" in San Francisco's Shoreline that took a surprising turn, ending with Yorke practically climbing up the walls before swiftly disappearing completely. "Before the final encore, I smoked a blunt with Jonny," Yorke says. "I went back on and started playing Everything in Its Right Place and got completely lost."

"I think I sang the second verse first, and then I was looking at the keyboard going, 'What’s this?'," he continues. "Then, I went to sing the next verse, and I realized, I’ve just sung that, and I looked at the others, and they were all going [makes a face] “Get us out of this one.” I’m just going around the riff, looking at the audience, and they’re all singing the words, and I’m going, “What?” I was so high, I just got up from the piano and walked off."

Elsewhere in the interview, Yorke reveals the one singer from musical history he'd love to duet with the most (John Lennon) and picks out his favourite vocal performance, the haunting and ethereal Bloom from The King of Limbs. "On the surface, that’s quite simple, but actually is a real bastard, which is what’s nice about it," he says. 

"You kind of have to sing it in this way that’s reeeeeally open. But when you do it live, it’s much harder because there’s a lot of technical shit going on, and you have to totally forget about the chaos and come in with this really open voice. It’s a bit like playing trumpet because you’re not thinking about the words, you’re making just this sound — Raaaaaaaa!"

Jason Thomas Gordon's The Singers Talk is available now.

There comes a time in most guitar players’ lives when all of a sudden we realise our tube amps are too loud. Sometimes we find this out by ourselves. Occasionally, there’s an intervention, from our families, or maybe the local authorities. More often than not it’s an embattled sound engineer who raises the red flag. Ed O’Brien can relate.

The EOB and Radiohead guitarist stopped by GigRig HQ to spec up a new pedalboard – and if ever we are in need of stompbox inspiration, we will find it here. And the conversation around the build, and partly why he wanted to switch things up, revealed that after 35 years or so as a pro musician O’Brien has reached an epiphany with amplification. By using smaller amps he could push them and find their sweet spot a lot easier.

This is, after all, the great conundrum with the tube amp. We love the musicality, the break-up, and even how they make nonsense phrases like “the feel of the sound” make sense in context. But we all know we have to turn them up loud to get their lungs going. It’s only when the power tubes are pushed into the aerobic zone and get a little red in the cheek that the amp really opens up. 

That can be a problem onstage, and it has presented O’Brien with many a problem when playing live. The stage volume issue is particularly acute when playing with Radiohead. This, he says, is the difference between a band like Radiohead and a band like U2, who can get away with a wall of noise onstage as the Edge’s guitar, Adam Clayton’s bass guitar and Larry Mullen Jr’s drums each occupy their own space in the mix.

“I remember standing side of stage to U2, years and years ago, like ’97, and the thing that you notice side of stage is how loud they are onstage,” says O’Brien. “Like, Edge has got his AC30s cranked, because Larry the drummer is so loud as well! As is Adam’s bass rig, and it is almost like The Who. You can do it if you are a four-piece. It’s rock. But despite what people might think, Radiohead are not rock. We have had our rocky moments. We have rock moments. They tended to be when we were younger. But the music is more nuanced.”

Some might take issue with that. Rock is a broad church. But O’Brien explained why;  Radiohead were trying to do something more nuanced. They could never be too loud onstage. Even if they wanted to turn up, they were at a numerical disadvantage. With his, Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood’s guitars all operating in a similar frequency range, it just wouldn’t work. 

When O'Brien found himself onstage on his last EOB tour, an old AC30 and a Vibro-King in his rig, something had to give. It was time to change.

“The Vibro-King only starts getting really interesting around three-and-a-half, which is flippin’ loud!” he says. “I had the soundman saying to me, ’Please, I can hear your amp from the stage in the middle of the arena!’ And my tech, Adam, Adam’s like, ‘Listen, the amp only starts cooking at about three-and-a-half.’ And I’m caught between the two. I just want everyone to be happy.”

So O’Brien started scaling down, reverting to the Big Chopper from Audio Kitchen, switching it down to 15-watts. He had two of them, same deal, using them as a wet/dry live rig and yet they were still too loud for the studio. 

Now? It’s a hand-wired Fender Deluxe and an AC15, which brings him to his new ‘board build with Dan Steinhardt, GigRig owner and host of That Pedal Show, on which he can decommission the distortion pedals in favour of boosts and preamps to push the amp. 

There are some gourmet choices, such as a  Soundgas 636 Preamp, which puts the Grampian/Soundgas 636 mic preamp used by the likes of Lee Scratch Perry and Pete Townshend into pedal form, and the Eventide H90. And powering all this is the new Gen-X-14 pedalboard powersupply that GigRig launched last week. Check it out the ‘board build above.

There aren’t many Radiohead songs you can busk. High And Dry is one, Fake Plastic Trees another. But after The Bends, Karma Police is one of few other contenders. As the second single to be released from 1997’s epochal OK Computer, Karma Police was part of a rare run of four Radiohead singles to reach the UK Top 10 (No 8). It even reached the giddy heights of No 50 in Holland.

Still, Radiohead were never exactly chart-toppers in the traditional sense. OK Computer might be on every smart guitarist’s ‘must-hear’ list, but it remains a baffling, if brilliant, album. After the critical and commercial success of The Bends, Radiohead in ’96 had the weight of expectation on their shoulders. They first decamped to rural Oxfordshire, then to Somerset to record OK Computer. “The only concept that we had for this album was that we wanted to record it away from the city and that we wanted to record it ourselves,” bassist Colin Greenwood commented.

“Parlophone gave them all this money to go out and buy gear,” producer Nigel Godrich recalled. “They asked me what they should buy and three months down the line I found myself sitting in front of all this gear. So Radiohead have a mobile studio now: there’s a big mixing desk, two massive racks which you just plonk down, plug ’em in, pull the front off and all the gear is there, and a two-inch tape machine, and it’s great. You’ve just got the freedom to go anywhere. That was the idea in the first place.”

Most of OK Computer was recorded at St Catherine’s Court, a 15th century Tudor mansion near Bath owned by Jane Seymour (yes, the ex Bond girl and she of Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman). Radiohead’s ‘control room’ was installed in the library, the ballroom was the main live studio, and corridors and hallways became impromptu vocal booths. “We rolled tons of tapes,” said Godrich. “It was exhausting. I could finish a recording session with one of the band at 4am, and at 8am another one would wake full of ideas and come knocking on my door with a cup of tea in their hand, ‘Er, come quick, I’ve got an idea for the bass’. Technologically, it’s not an impressive record, but it’s intended this way. We didn’t want to get swallowed by the machines.”

Radiohead admit that their ideas for OK Computer were sprawling and hard to edit. “The biggest pressure was actually completing it,” said guitarist Ed O’Brien. “We weren’t given any deadlines and we had complete freedom to do what we wanted. We were delaying it because we were a bit frightened of actually finishing stuff.”

Karma Police itself was one of the simplest songs on the album, growing out of an in-band joke, as guitarist Jonny Greenwood explained: “Karma police was a band catchphrase for a while on tour – whenever someone was behaving in a particularly shitty way, we’d say, ‘The karma police will catch him sooner or later’. But it’s not a revenge thing, just about being happy with your own behaviour.”

“Karma is an important idea,” Thom Yorke said. “I like it. It makes me nicer to people. It fills me with joy. This song makes me laugh. It was Ed’s idea.”

If Karma Police really does make Yorke laugh, it only reinforces the notion of him as a somewhat obtuse lyricist. Next to the highly edited guitar spasms of Paranoid Android or the funereal drone of Exit Music (For A Film), Karma Police is the Radiohead equivalent of a folk song. The Beatles’ Sexy Sadie, written by John Lennon for 1968’s so-called ‘Whiten Album’ sounds like a clear (yet unconfirmed) inspiration.

A simple yet pretty melody starting around the key of A minor/A Dorian (later shifting to B minor), it sees Greenwood on keys, Yorke playing his Gibson Hummingbird acoustic (fitted with a Fishman soundhole pickup) and O’Brien on a Rickenbacker 360 Fireglo, in charge of guitaristic scribble and embellishments. The ending sees O’Brien’s AMS digital delay unit feeding back on itself. According to Yorke: “We said, ‘Put down the headphones and just go’, and so Ed made weird noises, and we taped that a few times. Sometimes the best stuff happens when you’re not even listening at all.” Poor Ed O’Brien. Even many hardcore Radiohead fans assume it’s always Jonny Greenwood making all the baffling guitar noises. It’s not.

Karma Police quickly became a concert sing-along anthem. “Loads of the music on OK Computer is extremely uplifting,” Yorke reflected to Pitchfork. “It’s only when you read the words that you’d think otherwise.”

Indeed, the lyrics underneath are acerbic. “Karma police, arrest this girl / Her Hitler hairdo is making me feel ill / And we have crashed her party…” Whatever a girl’s ‘Hitler hairdo’ might be, it’s hardly complimentary. The references of a man who “talks in maths” and “we’re still on the payroll” have led many ’Head heads to surmise Karma Police is about EMI record company executives and music agents that Radiohead were trying to escape.

Yorke’s pay-off of, “for a minute there, I lost myself” shows the singer truly understands the paymaster/artist relationship all too well – don’t bite the hand that feeds. After all, EMI/Parlophone had betted on the band’s huge success and given an open cheque book for Radiohead to do whatever they liked.

Yorke’s only elaboration on the meaning keeps you guessing: “It’s for someone who has to work for a large company. This is a song against bosses. F*** the middle management.” Remember that, just in case you start playing Karma Police with too much jollity.

• Producer John Leckie on recording Radiohead classic Fake Plastic Trees: “There were so many demos that sounded like major songs, but that one was near the top of the list"

25 years ago, Radiohead’s genre-bending, era-defining OK Computer entered the UK Albums Chart at the number one position.

Winning a Grammy award for the Best Alternative Music Performance, the band’s third studio album remained in the top 40 for nigh on a year.

Progressive, dynamic and daring, OK Computer pushed the envelope of guitar music into uncharted territory and received a hero’s welcome from fans and musicians alike.

Self-produced with long-time collaborator Nigel Godrich, the album marked a stylistic turning point in Radiohead’s career as they continued to freely explore new sonic ground.

OK Computer’s lead single, Paranoid Android, scored Radiohead their highest charting single to date, reaching number three in the UK Singles Chart.

Clocking in at around six-and-a-half minutes, Paranoid Android is considered relatively lengthy for a single, although the original version was well over twice as long – courtesy of lead guitarist Jonny Greenwood’s Hammond organ solo.

A skilled multi-instrumentalist and composer, Greenwood’s organ odyssey was ultimately replaced by a series of unforgettable electric guitar parts, some of which are thought to have been processed using a rare Mutronics Mutator.

This highly inventive approach to guitar tone extended to Greenwood's pedalboard where he was able to produce a wide spectrum of unique sounds from dreamy lysergic delays to angular assaults of distortion.

According to the excellent Radiohead gear site thekingofgear.com, Greenwood’s 1997/1998 OK Computer tour rig comprised an Electro-Harmonix Small Stone phaser, Demeter Tremulator tremolo, DOD Envelope Filter 440, DigiTech WH-1 Whammy Pedal and Boss LS-2 Line Selector.

It is believed the LS-2 split the signal to a Vox AC30 tube amp (via a Boss SD-1 Super Overdrive, Boss RV-3 Digital Reverb/Delay and Roland RE-201 Space Echo tape echo/spring reverb unit) and a Fender Eighty-Five solid state guitar amp (via a Marshall Shred Master distortion in front of a Boss FV-300H volume pedal).

In 1995, Greenwood’s original Fender Telecaster Plus guitars were stolen, prompting him to acquire a replacement sunburst model, as featured in the clip below.

Sporting stock Lace Sensor pickups – comprising a Dually Red-Red humbucker and Blue single coil in the bridge and neck positions, respectively – this guitar was rewired with an Apem 300 series pushbutton switch that momentarily cuts the signal.

The addition of this kill switch enabled Greenwood to create the stuttering effects heard during live renditions of OK Computer songs such as Airbag, Electioneering and Paranoid Android.

Browse the Radiohead catalogue here.

A super-rare Radiohead cassette demo from the band's early days at Abingdon School, Oxfordshire, has been sold at auction for £6,000.

With an inlay card written and designed by Thom Yorke, the demo, titled Gripe, was recorded to a classic TDK D 60 cassette tape and credited to On A Friday – the pre-Radiohead name the band used – and sold by Omega Auctions on 26 January.

The inlay card says the Gripe was recorded at Woodworm Studios, Oxfordshire, which was founded by Fairport Convention's Dave Pegg over 30 years ago. Woodworm played an important role in the band's formative years, as On A Friday/Radiohead would track a number of demos before being signed to EMI and urged to change their name.

Initially, they resisted, before taking the name Radiohead from the Talking Heads song. There are a number of Radiohead cassette demos from the On A Friday era. In 2013, Omega Auctions sold a 1986 demo for £2000.

The tracklisting on the lot and the inlay card doesn't seem to match. The cassette itself reads "Gripe + 3 trax at beginning" in Yorke's handwriting, copyright 1987. The inlay card says it is copyright Funtime Records, 1988. From the pictures, it looks the tracklisting reads Happy Song, To Be A Brilliant Light, and Sinking Ship – all written by Yorke.

The credits list Thom Yorke on vocals/guitar, Ed O'Brien on vocals/guitar, Phil Selway on drums, Jon Greenwood on keys, viola and harmonica, with Colin Greenwood on bass. Also credited are Raz Petersen on lead alto sax, with Liz and Charlotte cotton on alto sax. The recording was engineered by Tim.

Six-thousand bucks is a lot of money even for the most ardent Radiohead fans. But luckily YouTube hosts a wealth of On A Friday-era demos. Stylistically, they are all over the place, and that's part of the charm. Check out the aforementioned 1986 demo below, which predates Jonny Greenwood's time in the band.

Fender has produced a lot of artist-designed Strats over the years, but the format has stayed largely the same: a branded single coil here, a neck tweak there, but it’s still very much the model that set the world alight back in ’54. 

It’s taken an unconventional player like Radiohead’s sonic architect Ed O’Brien to deliver a fresh take on the Strat outline, and one that can inspire a new generation of players - just don’t call it a signature. 

Ed has crammed his ‘designed-with’ Sustainer Strat with tech while staying as faithful to the traditional Strat look as possible. 

The headline-grabbing addition is the Fernandes Sustainer, which provides the key to the alternate realm of guitar tones that awaits. 

Essentially, the system generates a magnetic field, which causes the strings to vibrate - trust us, you can feel it working - and this interaction between the neck- position Sustainer Driver and the bridge humbucker results in infinite sustain and feedback sounds. The inclusion of said system results in a number of subtle but crucial tweaks. 

There’s the addition of two mini-toggle switches to control the Sustainer system, shifting the trademark body-mounted output jack to the side. A tone control is replaced by a Sustainer intensity knob (marked ‘volume’), while the rear of the guitar features a 9V battery compartment and additional cavity for the electrical wizardry that operates the device. 

Ed’s pickup choices bolster the model’s versatility further still. Complementing the single-coil Sustainer Driver is a Texas Special Strat single, which packs an overwound, beefier character than your vintage Strat types, plus a Seymour Duncan JB Jr single coil-sized humbucker in the bridge. Pair that with the Sustainer system and that’s a lot of tones from one guitar. 

Despite the added gadgetry, the first thing you notice when you pick up the EOB Strat is the neck - as you’ll know from our interview with the man himself, Ed tried a lot of Strats, settling on this ’56 shape. It’s a more palm-filling V than the generic C we’ve come to expect from Mexican-made Fenders and provides an extremely comfortable, chunky feel, bolstered by an engaging light satin finish. 

With the Sustainer switched off, you might expect the neck pickup to be adequate rather than impressive, but it’s one of the standout sounds here: a fat, crystal-clear humbucker-meets- single-coil sound that’s ripe for adding effects. 

In-between positions will get you into glassier, more traditional (albeit hotter) Strat territory, while the middle-position Texas Special lends a shimmery, brighter texture - clean players will enjoy the Edge-like sheen this option lends arpeggios. 

Our review model’s bridge humbucker, meanwhile, offered a slightly lower output than the neck, but adds a healthy helping of chime. Like the Sustainer Driver, it’s an ideal balance of single-coil transparency and humbucker weight - spot-on for jangly rhythm work. 

Then, of course, there’s the Sustainer. The switch closest to the output jack turns it on and off, while the other selects between three modes: Natural sustains your current note; Harmonic provides a pitch a 5th higher; and Mix is a blend of the two. 

Natural mode is great for extended drones, but the real fun comes with Harmonic mode which, when paired with a heavy dose of gain, produces tones akin to a theremin or synth that you can then manipulate using the EOB’s smooth-moving vintage-style Synchronized vibrato or external pitch effects, such as a Whammy pedal. Throw in a looper to see how the foundations of Ed’s sonic canvases are laid. 

In many respects, the EOB Stratocaster isn’t a revolutionary guitar - after all, the Sustainer itself has been around for decades - but in pairing its namesake system with a hugely versatile set of pickups and a classic outline at a sub-£1,000 price point, Fender has produced a guitar that will appeal to players from all sonic walks of life. 

Amid musings of ‘the death of the guitar’, we need instruments like this, which offer something different without being a gimmick: something that, in the right hands, can redefine the expectations of what a guitar can do. 

It was one of the most exciting announcements to come out of 2017's Summer NAMM, and now Fender's collaboration with Radiohead guitar genius Ed O’Brien has been released in the form of the EOB Sustainer Stratocaster.

Ed has kitted his Strat out with an intriguing combo of pickups: a Seymour Duncan JB Jr humbucker in the bridge, Texas Special single coil in the middle and Fernandes Sustainer in the neck, which is where the model gets its name.

Control over the Sustainer’s infinite sustain comes via an on/off switch, intensity knob and three-position switch, to adjust between fundamental-only, harmonic-only or blend modes.

Elsewhere, there’s a vintage-style synchronized tremolo bridge, vintage-style tuning machines, a ‘10/56 V’ neck profile, 21 narrow-jumbo frets and a synthetic bone nut.

Ed’s model is also notable for eschewing the any form of signature on the instrument, instead opting for a custom ‘Flower of Life’ engraved neck plate.

This is surely the most intriguing signature Strat Fender has produced for some time, and more importantly, it’s the first piece of Radiohead signature gear ever.

The EOB Sustainer Stratocaster is available now for £979/$1,099.

Any chance of reissuing Jonny Greenwood’s favoured Telecaster Plus while you’re at it, Fender?

Ed O’Brien is the unsung hero of Radiohead. Where Jonny Greenwood is the man performing the wiry, acerbic anti-solos and Thom Yorke the rhythmic six-string backbone, Ed’s role is harder to define - but that’s exactly how he likes it.

Raised on ’80s indie heroes, Ed’s evolution has been fascinating to observe and, of course, to hear. From 2000’s Kid A onwards, the guitarist’s propensity for exploring new effects and textures, many of which are very much alien to the instrument’s traditional role, is integral to the band’s uneasy, ethereal edge.

It’s fitting, then, that Ed should be the man to tastefully radicalise the Stratocaster with the EOB Strat, a ‘designed-with’ model that stays true to the guitar’s iconic outline, but equips it with the otherworldly Fernandes Sustainer system and a hugely versatile set of pickups.

Ed’s enthusiasm for his collaborative creation is undeniable. We meet the guitarist in a small studio in west London, where he’s midway through a bout of sonic exploration with an early batch of EOB models running through his full pedalboard and amp rig.

After thanking MusicRadar for providing “a great resource” for gearheads like himself (you’re welcome, Ed), he hands us a guitar. “Try it - see what you think.” No pressure, then.

We’re pleased to report the final result is a seamless melding of Ed’s vision and the Strat’s idiosyncrasies: a chunkier-than normal neck is the first sign of something different, but a guided tour of the Sustainer’s possibilities through Ed’s well-stocked pedalboard is an eye-opener as to what a guitar like this can achieve.

Following that brief exploration of his Strat’s capabilities (during which we resist the urge to play Paranoid Android), we sat down with Ed to hear the full story of the guitar and his tonal journey through Radiohead’s unpredictable career: the essential tools, how he fits in with Jonny and Thom, and where he thinks the future of the guitar lies.

As someone who has played a lot of different guitars over the years, what first drew you to the Strat?

“I like the shape of it, I obviously like the sound of it, but I like the way it feels. I think British guitarists are all so drawn to the aesthetic - when you first get a guitar, the aesthetic is as important as how it plays; it’s gotta look cool.

“The first guitar I bought, when we formed the band back in 1985, was a Westone Spectrum DX. It was all-black, and Colin [Greenwood] had the matching bass. And it looked wicked, with coil-splits. I cottoned on pretty quickly that it wasn’t that nice to play… so the next guitar that I bought at the beginning of ’87 was a Squier Strat and that was enough. I couldn’t afford a Strat, but I could afford a Squier Strat. That was all I had until we got signed in 1991. And I didn’t need anything else  - it was great. It did the job.

“So I’ve always liked Strats. Jonny [Greenwood] would take the piss out of me a bit with it being a bit ‘rock’ or something. I had a Rickenbacker as well, so I think that offset it. I loved the yin and the yang [of that], and when you wanted to finesse something or do something really beautiful, you’d pull out the Strat. It was brilliant with effects.

“It’s one of the most iconic guitars in the world, and I love the feel of it; I like the way it fits in the body. I like its femininity: the Les Paul and the Tele are a lot more masculine. There’s a roundness, a femininity about the Strat that I really love.”

When did the Sustainer pickup first become such an integral part of your sound?

“The big thing that relates to this is Kid A. We’d made three records; the first one is really guitar-y, a little bit of effects; the second one, there are more effects; the third one, OK Computer, I’m playing a lot of delay and we’ve got all sorts of simple stuff but really effect-y and the sound is getting less distorted with the guitars and it’s more about textures. When it came to Kid A, after the initial sessions, it was decided that the conventional-sounding band was not doing it for us, so the whole thing was, ‘Bring synths in, throw our tools away.’

“The first time I heard the Sustainer thing was on Michael Brook’s infinite sustain guitar - he gave one to the Edge on The Joshua Tree; that’s the sound on With Or Without You, that high-pitched thing. So as a young guitarist I was always drawn to sounds that didn’t sound like the guitar.

“The first guitarist who made an impression on me was Andy Summers, because when you heard Walking On The Moon, it was guitar, but with all the delay and the chorus, it sounded like he was on the moon. And then people like Edge and Johnny Marr, we were spoiled for choice - there were all these amazing guitarists who were trying to do things that didn’t sound like the guitar.

“I’ve always been drawn to people who put the song first. The guitarists who were important for me were Johnny Marr and Edge, people like that, and Peter Buck and Andy Summers. I didn’t hear Led Zeppelin or Jimmy Page until I was 27, which was extraordinary. I didn’t know about those epic guitar heroes until then. And John McGeogh was another big influence, from Magazine and Siouxsie and the Banshees. They were great guitarists, but they weren’t lead guitarists. Again, everything they did was about the song. That’s where I came from, so I guess that’s where I naturally gravitate.

“So when we threw guitars out, I got in contact with Michael Brook and had a great conversation when we were in the studio. And he directed me towards Fernandes, who had the Sustainer. I had a Clapton Strat from the mid-’90s, and we put the Sustainer unit in there, and that’s when we started using it, around 2000.

“It’s always been a go-to guitar for me on every album; it does a certain thing. My problem with the ones that I had was that the way we did it was it sounded crap functioning as a normal guitar. It sounded great as a Sustainer.

“I want a guitar that can do both: in Radiohead, when we were playing live, I was changing guitar every song, and it was driving me nuts. Because your fingers are trying to get used to a different [instrument]… in a way, it was inhibiting. For the bulk of the set, I want one guitar that does the job. And that’s when I approached Fender - that was what I wanted: a guitar that could sustain, but also sounded as a great guitar.”

How did the idea for the EOB Strat come about?

“It was early 2013. I literally had a dream about it - a really strong, compelling dream - and I woke up and I immediately wrote an email to Neil [Whitcher, head of Fender artist relations], who I knew through Johnny Marr. I’d never had any desire to do anything like this before at all, but the dream was so strong and it was complete; it was like, ‘I have to do this.’

“Neil passed it on to his boss, [senior vice president] Justin Norvell and it was about the story of the guitar and what I wanted to do. And a big part of it was that when you’re young, as a player, you usually start off on a budget, but there’s one guitar where you save up and make the step up, and that’s what I’m hoping this guitar might be: something that young players can get their hands on.

“And it’s fantastic. It’s a great-sounding Strat, and it looks amazing, but at the flick of a switch you enter another world. My whole thing with them was like, ‘I’m not interested in doing a signature.’ For a start, I don’t feel I’m worthy of that - people like Johnny Marr are different. I wanted to do a collaboration, a design: I’ve got this idea, but I want kids to be able to afford it - that’s so important. The Custom Shop does amazing stuff, but it’s out of the price range of most people.

“They were brilliant; Neil said, ‘We’ve got this amazing factory in Ensenada, in Mexico,’ and that became a really, really important part. So, Ensenada are making it, and I’m really, really chuffed to bits about that.”

Your name doesn’t appear on the headstock, but you’ve got the custom neckplate on there...

“Yeah, it’s my tattoo: the flower of life. This means a lot to me. I didn’t want to make a big song and dance about it, but I wanted something on there, and it’s not about me: this is a very, very ancient symbol, from all over the world, and I just thought it would be cool. Most people won’t even notice it, but it’s there.

“I didn’t want to have my name on it - it’s great if Radiohead fans like it, but I feel like it’s more than Radiohead; it’s more than me. I just want this guitar to be out there, because I think it’s got the potential of people doing extraordinary things with it, and doing different things and making their own mark on it. So, the less it has my name on it, the better. That’s why the ‘designed with’, that feels right.”

What were the key aspects you specified for the model?

“The first thing was the neck. Partly because I don’t own a lot of Strats, I don’t know any vintage Strats, because they’ve quite frankly been too expensive, so what they did was three years ago, we did a trip and went over to Fender - we started off in Corona in the Custom Shop with Alex Perez.

“The first thing we started off on was the neck; it was great - I was going up and [trying them]: everything from a Stevie Ray Vaughan neck, which is massive, and it’s amazing, but I’ve got big hands, so I wanted something that filled my hands that I would do the job with, but obviously, I wanted it to be a guitar that people with smaller hands [could play]. So I was just like, ‘Oh, that feels good’, and that’s basically a ’56 neck.

“Colour was important: I really wanted it to be white; I just felt the white suited. People told me about the lineage of the white Strat and how iconic it was, and I had no idea about the whole Hendrix thing, so there was that.

“And then we also went through trying the Sustainiac. This is the Fernandes Sustainer; I tried the Sustainiac and it’s a good unit, but there were some issues. So [Fender] went to Fernandes, which was good, because I’m used to the Fernandes, so I knew how it would work.

“The Sustainer works in conjunction with the bridge pickup and creates a kind of magnetic field. You can’t use the single coil here - it has to be the [bridge] humbucker. We had a few squealing issues on some of the prototypes, and that was from the humbucker not being right. I pick up a guitar, and I go, ‘I like this’ and ‘that sounds great’; I don’t go deep and go, ‘Well, why is that?’

“I liked a lot of those early-’90s and late-’80s Lace Sensor pickups; I love them on the Clapton Strats, and obviously Johnny has it on his Tele. They’re great-sounding pickups. And I just kept saying, ‘I want something neutral; I’m not fussed about it sounding like a vintage Strat - I want it to sound just like the Lace Sensors.’”

Those pickups are ideal for running through effects.

“Exactly. Perfect. And great for distortion, and great for clean sound, and just really great for a really true tone. I’m not a massive vintage Strat fan, the sound of it; that’s not where I come from.

“So then there was a bit of to-ing and fro-ing on the pickups; the beginning of last year, Alex put this Seymour Duncan Jeff Beck Jr in, and that sounded great, worked really well, so we got those two, and the last one was finding the middle pickup. And we found the Texas Special sounded great. It sounded a little bit different, there’s a little bell tone.

“What I like in a guitar is I like to have three quite different-sounding pickups, so I would normally play most of my stuff on the bridge, so I want my bridge to not be too thin and trebly; I want it to have a bit of guts to it. And then I want my neck pickup to be warm and fat and classically neck, and I want the middle one to do something exactly in between it, and that’s what the Texas Hot did.

“This seemed like a good place to [put the controls]. So you’re playing normally, and then you engage it. Because a lot of the time, I play, and it might be at the end of something you’re playing - for instance, it could be the end of a song with a lot of distortion, and you want to keep the feedback going, and you just click it in and it keeps it going. It had to be there, and I wanted to keep all this clear.

“And the other thing is, it had to look good. It’s really important, isn’t it? [laughs] I think you want it to look great, and so placing [the output jack] there, that works as well; that’s a bit like the old Fender Elites. I’m not a Strat purist, but to me, that feels very normal; I don’t miss it being there.”

The new model must have ended up replacing a few guitars in your live rig, then.

“I took three of them out on tour for the last three years, and Adam, my guitar tech, who’s been with me for 20 years, he’s a guy who likes to keep busy and he gets bored very easily. My only concern about the tour was I kept saying to him, ‘Are you bored?’ because the first six or seven songs are all with this guitar. I bring out the Rickenbacker and the Ric 12 and the 335 when I needed to, but this can do it all.”

Finding new sounds must be an ongoing quest for your role in Radiohead. In the evolution of the band, have there been times when you’ve had to rethink your approach?

“Every record! You don’t want to repeat yourself. When we got to Kid A, we started off the first session and it’s not really good. Thom’s been listening to a lot of Boards Of Canada and our conventional setup wasn’t doing it for us. And that for me is why this guitar came about, because we were downing tools, downing guitars, downing traditional ways of recording and making music.

“It’s like anything in life, sometimes you need a shake-up, like, ‘Oh shit. What I’m doing is not great.’ Then you get out of your comfort zone. And getting out of your comfort zone is the place where you do your best stuff.

“That’s where this guitar came into being. Because I wanted a guitar that could sustain, so then it becomes more like a synthesizer. We took my Clapton Strat with Lace Sensor pickups that I loved, fitted a Fernandes Sustainer unit in it, and at the same time it was the birth of all these new looping pedals. The Akai HeadRush had come out and the Line 6 DL4. The combination of the two was… bonkers!

“It’s one thing making crazy sounds, but how do you harness them in a song? Sometimes you have to tack them onto a song, sometimes you have to pull them back and work them in. Kid A was the dramatic rethink, because we went from being quite traditional up until OK Computer - and it had served us really well, but it was basically guitar and keyboards.”

A lot of guitarists like to drive the song, but on Kid A, rhythm started to become more of a driving force in Radiohead’s music. Was that difficult at first?

“I don’t think I’ve ever driven a song in Radiohead - it was just a different way of thinking or feeling. I remember standing side stage for U2 at the Tibetan Freedom Concert [1997]. It was a classic band like The Who or something. Colossally loud, so powerful and so different to how Radiohead are as a band.

“It’s also different because Thom also plays great guitar as well. On the first album [Pablo Honey], particularly, he’s driving it with his rhythm playing, so my role was never to drive it rhythmically. I might arpeggiate and fingerpick stuff, but he would drive it as he sings it. So it was never difficult for me in that sense.

“What’s always been the hardest thing and used to be the most daunting was that Thom and Jonny used to write together a lot. So when we got to rehearsals, they had their parts worked out and I used to be like, ‘Where do I fit into this? Where do I find my space? You have that initial thought and then you think, ‘The song is great, okay, how do I work my way into this?’ And it was challenging. But that challenge is good because it forced me to think in a different way.

“I totally understand about accompaniment, I understand about layering stuff, and I also like light and shade in a song - Jimmy Page always talks about this. I like quiet and loud. Jonny and I used to joke that there are very few songs where we play all the way through. Whereas most guitarists in a band, that’s their modus operandi. I guess there’s an orchestral sentiment to what we do that’s all about the songs.

“So I might change sounds three times in a song. And at the start of a tour it’s like tap dancing and it’s not really like playing. Thank God for the G2 and TheGigRig [switching system]. It’s more of a technical thing than a playing thing, but you get over that and the technical side becomes second nature so you can concentrate on playing.”

Radiohead are a band who have worked through challenging creative periods, with maybe confidence issues being part of that. All bands encounter that but do you have any advice to pass to players for working through times like that?

“It’s like in life in general. For centuries, people have been calling those moments ‘the dark night of the soul’. And I think the creative process completely mirrors it. You have those times when you think you can’t do it and you’ve got to hang on - that’s all you can do.

“I remember a time down in New Zealand, going down to play with Neil Finn, and that’s when I first met Johnny Marr and Philip [Selway] came down, Sebastien Steinberg, Lisa Germano and Eddie Vedder. I remember the first night I was a bit freaked out by the musical company I was keeping. I was pretty insecure - it didn’t help that I’d smoked a big spliff either [laughs].

“But it didn’t matter with those first two days of hanging on. Rather than the self-doubt, the ‘shit, I can’t do this’ thing. I think everybody gets that. You understand that you grow from those moments and those big challenges. As long as you don’t give up. That’s the key. It’s a test to hold on. Be open, don’t feel sorry for yourself and know that’s just part of the process. It doesn’t make it any easier and you might not sleep that night, but it’ll all be okay. You’ll look back on it and you’ll only remember the good bits.”

‘It’s okay to not play’: that can be a big thing for guitar players.

“I think that it’s a massive thing for players. The worst thing that happens as a band, and we always do this is, we get into a rehearsal room to start a new record and everybody plays through everything. It’s fucking rubbish!

“Again, it’s about the light and shade in music. Let the drummer and bass player do the work, let the singer. Andy Summers was a master of where and when not to play. Space. My favourite guitarists know when not to play. Then you make more of it when you do play. Make it count.”

Songs like Climbing Up The Walls and Let Down on OK Computer saw the band recorded dynamic and live in a room together. Did you last do that on In Rainbows?

“We did a bit. Bodysnatchers, that was live. House Of Cards was... I think bits of All I Need and 15 Step. They’re usually sections, though, whereas those songs you mentioned on OK Computer, they were [whole] songs and because of our, shall we say, somewhat limited palette at that stage, we played them live. But it was enough; our palette was sated.

“I remember when we did Climbing Up The Walls it was just like, ‘Fuck! We made that sound just playing in that room all together.’ It was the same experience with Let Down. It was like they were real moments of magic. And that’s probably the last time we’ve done it like that in the studio, which is kind of a shame, really. But I don’t think you can repeat yourself.”

The EOB Strat joins your ever-changing setup; what are the key components of your guitar rig today?

“My pedalboard. I always have a [DigiTech] Whammy - and that again, in conjunction with the Sustainer, is really important. I like a wah, not for classic wah-wah but for tonal stuff. I’ll always have delays.

“The thing with Radiohead is it’s nine albums, and usually with each album, there comes a different sound. So, for instance, on The Bends stuff and OK Computer, the basic gear that I had was distortion pedal, an MXR phaser, Korg A2 and a Boss DD-5 Digital Delay. And they are so the sounds of my parts on that record. Actually, the last two years is the first time I haven’t taken out the A2, because we’re playing so little stuff off The Bends, and with an MXR Flanger and a Whammy and distortion, I can fool it.

“But I wanted as well to get away from rack gear. I really love TheGigRig; I love the G2. It’s made having pedals possible. So I’ve got a Kingsley Page preamp/boost pedals. I’ve got a couple of those that I use for distortion, and I’ve got a Thorpy what they used to call the Muffroom [now Fallout] Cloud, which is an amazing Big Muff pedal. I love the Line 6 looper, the old DL4. I find it really intuitive.

“I love also Electro-Harmonix delays. I’ve been taking out the Deluxe Memory Man with the tap tempo, which they claim has the same chips; I think some of them don’t but some of them do, and I’m lucky because just by chance I bought one that sounds amazing. I do a lot of controlling with feedback and stuff with the delay, so I control that with an effects pedal. I’ve got the usual tremolos and [Boss] DD-5 delays out. A compressor. I really love the Kingsley pedals - they’re just brilliant for distortion and boost.

“It’s been great knowing [TheGigRig founder] Daniel Steinhardt, because he’s been brilliant. He was the first guy I met who felt the same pedals that I do. I remember the first time we met, we were just talking about the Deluxe Memory Man. It’s a feel thing, isn’t it? I’ve tried so much stuff out. I’m understanding it a bit more, like the Catalinbread, this new Belle Epoch Deluxe, it’s fantastic - they’ve got all the bits, and they’ve done the whole power thing that they have going on in the Echoplex EP-3, and instead of tape there’s digital.

“I’ve stopped using Vibro-Kings, only because they’re louder, and I’m using Audio Kitchen, which I love - Steve Crow’s amps are brilliant, so I’ve been using the Big Chopper. That’s live - I haven’t used it in the studio yet, but I will use it in the studio.

“I’ll still use my Princeton, and I love the Vibro-King, but our soundman was complaining that I was too loud, and you have to get it to [the sweet spot], and if you’ve got three guitarists… I’ve been playing those for nine years, and I love them, I think they’re amazing-sounding amps, but I had to bring it down in tone. And it’s always nice to get new gear and evolve, isn’t it?”

On that note, is there the possibility of any more ‘designed-with’ gear?

“It’s not something I’m seeking to do. This whole thing, because it did come from a dream, it wasn’t like I thought it; it’s like I felt it - I felt compelled to do it. My view on life anyway is I don’t really have grand plans; I have things I’d like to do - I’d like to make an album - but also what I like about the journey is being open.

“You know, six years ago, if you’d said I was going to make a guitar with Fender, I’d have gone, ‘Nah, that’s for people like Johnny [Marr], who’s such an iconic guitarist.’ But Fender have been absolutely brilliant, and they totally get it.”

Do you have any standout sounds that you’re most proud of, and how did you achieve them?

“The Memory Man, the Klon, the Whammy… I use those a lot with the Sustainer. They’re all kind of variants on that. A lot of the stuff around In Rainbows was like that. [At this point, Ed launches into the thick, sustaining lines from All I Need.] On that song, All I Need, I had a Sustainer Strat with four bottom Es, so you’ve got a thicker [sound]. That’s used in conjunction with the Memory Man, then a lot of the songs, like Pyramid Song, you’d loop.

“A lot of the time, it’s a bit like you’re creating a canvas. That would be in accompaniment with Thom playing chords on the piano - you’re building up a cloud of effects behind. It would be very hard for me in Radiohead to do a gig without a distortion pedal, a Memory Man and a Whammy. I think if I had those three, then I’d probably cover 90 per cent of things. It could be another delay pedal, but that’s the default one.”

With more access to gear compared with when you started, has it become harder or easier to go to new places and feelings with tones?

“I think it is a bit [harder]. The amount of pedals I’ve bought in the last four or five years, particularly delay pedals, and you give it one listen and you go, ‘It’s good, but it’s not right.’ There’s a lot of really good stuff out there, but I’ve got to the stage now where I’m lucky. So I can buy an old reconditioned Binson Echorec and I plug in and I go, ‘This is amazing.’ So any new gear that comes out has got to do that to me. There’s lots of really good stuff out there.

“It’s interesting because with the onset of this whole thing with simulation, like Strymon, who make great pedals but it’s simulation. Digital simulation. The quality is so good, but I’ve had that and now if I buy something and I want to get inspired, it has to be almost better than that. We’re lucky, because a lot of boutique pedal makers are doing that.

“I’ve just got this amazing pedal called Infinite Jets [Resynthesizer] by Hologram - it’s extraordinary. I know it will be all over the next bit of recording that I do. I think we’re living in a golden age, aren’t we? And Joel [Korte, Chase Bliss Audio], I just bought the Tonal Recall pedal from him. His pedals have extraordinary amount of depth and have all these dip switches on the end of them. These people are going deep.

“Electro-Harmonix are an amazing company because they always seem to do great stuff and on a budget. The HOG 2 is great. 20 years ago, I had a Korg A2, which I loved. It was 16-bit digital but it sounded great to my ears then. It’s about being moved, and it’s very hard to be moved by the same thing. It’s like making a record: you immerse yourself in that world and you use it all up and then try and find the next thing. It’s a matter of feeling your way through it. Trawling through and finding out what the new pedals or guitar are.

There’s so much stuff out there; 20 years ago, there wasn’t. The distortion pedals that are being made are incredible. All these companies - Diamond, and Catalinbread... one of the great things for me is hooking up with these people - Analogman and companies like that. One of the best things about being on the road - particularly when we’re in America - is I usually contact them and say, ‘Do you guys fancy coming down to a gig?’

“Like Spaceman pedals in Portland, Oregon that I love - I first met Zak, who runs the company, on tour. They’re stuck away doing this stuff and it’s real craftsmanship. I had to say to him, ‘Thank you, you inspire us.’ And inspiration for a musician is everything. If you’re inspired by your sounds, that keeps you going and music can come out of that.”

Are you quite open as a band in terms of talking about guitar parts between yourself, Jonny and Thom - do you offer each other guidance or tend to stay out of each other’s areas?

“We kind of stay out of each other’s areas. The thing Jonny and I were trying to do, we’ve always weaved guitar parts. That idea that if you’ve got two or three guitarists, you weave parts within. And we talked about it, but we’ve never sat down and worked it out. It just happens by osmosis. Very occasionally it might get said, ‘How about trying something like this?’, but there’s a lot of autonomy within the band.

“And likewise, if you don’t come up with a guitar part, there’s no guitar part. Nobody is going to hold your hand. Nobody is going to say, ‘Why don’t you do that?’ So you have to come up with something that really works for the song, and that’s quite a hard thing because there’s space within a song; what are you going to do? You have to come up with that yourself. And creativity is 90 per cent of stuff that you do doesn’t make it: that’s not a failure, that’s just part of the process. So if you try something sometimes it doesn’t quite work or bingo, you tried something and it changes it and puts it into focus.

“There’s a lot more talking between Jonny and Thom because they’ve tended to write with one another. Thom has used Jonny as a songwriting foil quite a lot, and when it gets into the rehearsal rooms it’s open to all of us, and that’s when arrangements get changed. So Thom and Jonny have established a working relationship, but it’s not normally about a sound. It’s about a chord or something, some melodic idea.”

How would you describe your gear philosophy compared with Thom and Jonny?

“Jonny, by the very virtue of the fact that there are many instruments he can play, he doesn’t necessarily seek new pedals and stuff like that. And by virtue of the fact that I just play guitar, I’m always seeking; so I search out a lot more sounds and pedals through the guitar. He gets his thing through composing for orchestras and extraordinary stuff. He likes different instruments; I really like the guitar, and it’s something that I feel comfortable with, and I’m just drawn to what guitars can do and the sounds of them, as well as great pedals.

“Thom is a lead singer, and he loves synths as well. I’m more of the gearhead. You know, Thom will come over to my pedalboard and say, ‘Wow, what’s this?’ Last year, he got the Strymon [TimeLine] delay pedal, and he’s going, ‘Wow, this thing’s amazing!’ And he said, ‘Do you know it?’ and I said, ‘Well, you haven’t noticed one’s been on my ’board for six years?’ [laughs]

“What I’ve done in the recording studio in the past is I usually get in an hour or an hour and a half early, and that’s when I do just freeform sound exploration - trying different pedals in different orders and putting various pedals in. It’s been good, because the thing about what Radiohead’s been into is finding different sounds, so with a guitar and an amp and pedals, that’s just a joy.”

Does the gear dictate the songwriting, in that respect?

“They all evolve at the same time. When I write, there are some times I write with acoustic, but other times I’ll write with a sound, and a sound that’s inspired you. And I’ve used this [system] a lot - the Sustainer again is a brilliant way of writing: it sets a palette. I wouldn’t say one dictates the other; it kind of evolves - it’s chicken and egg.

“Thom writes the bones of the songs, but there’s [gear-led] stuff on Kid A. Treefingers: that was the Sustainer with one of the first loopers that came in. I built the Sustainer guitar the same time that the Akai HeadRush came out, and the Line 6 DL4. These two things were extraordinary: suddenly you could do these great sounds.

“Planet Telex [was effects-led]. But I wouldn’t say that was because of the sound of the guitar; the guitar responded to the gated piano in the studio. But a lot of the times, for me, when music is really in focus and right, it’s very visual. Sound, for me, is very visual, so I’m trying to find a sound that feels like the song. That’s kind of what I’ve been doing in Radiohead. You know, Thom might play something, and you go, ‘I can see this; I can see a place.’ It’s usually quite geographical. And then a lot of it, for me, is about finding the right sound to play that.

“I read a Miles Davis quote, which reassured me, because I can’t really play unless my sound’s right; it doesn’t flow, and I’m sure that’s the same with most people. And Miles Davis said the same thing. He said, ‘If my sound isn’t right, I can’t play. And if I can’t play, I can’t make love to my wife. And if I can’t make love to my wife…’ You know, there’s this chain thing. And it’s just like, ‘Oh wow, he’s saying that, and he can really play.’

“The sound thing is really, really key; it’s an obvious thing to say, but as well, using effects - I know that anything that makes it onto the ’board has truly, truly inspired me. And the bar is quite high - there’s a lot of good stuff out there, but it’s the really amazing stuff that I’m like, ‘Okay, that’s it.’ Because that inspires you to write great stuff.

“You know, you can plug into an old Echoplex and you can play for hours. That inspires you. Anything that I have - it’s like with this guitar - that’s what I’m looking for, and it’s a feeling thing; it’s not an intellectual thing. It’s something you feel, and you go, ‘This is exciting.’”

What are your thoughts on guitar’s place in music today?

“I was thinking about this yesterday - it’s weird, because if you want to make a cultural impact as a kid, it’s probably not through a guitar; it’s on decks, isn’t it? Jimi Hendrix nowadays would probably be a DJ, and doing extraordinary things.

“But I think the guitar will always be there because it’s such an expressive instrument, and it’s very old. The guitar goes back thousands of years; it goes back to the lyre, you’re plucking strings. It’s something very, very fundamental. I’ve got an ngoni, from Mali, and it’s four strings and it’s a shell of a body with a piece of round wood, and there’s something just very primal about it. People are always saying it’s the death of the guitar, but it’s obviously flourishing. There’s more metal around, there’s more rock, and there are people doing great things with it.

“For me, band-wise, I love Savages. I think what Gemma [Thompson] does as a guitarist is brilliant, and the sound of it, and I love that band. And I love Warpaint. I love what they do. Again, it’s not about guitar heroes; it’s about beautiful guitar lines, textures, sounds. But then also I really like what Michael Kiwunuka is doing, and what Jimmy [Smith] and Yannis [Philippakis] do in Foals - I think they’ve got a great thing going on; I love their style.

“I think guitar is as relevant as ever, really; it might just be that there are more options, musically, to express yourself these days. You think about 50 years ago, it was organ and pianos and keyboards; synths hadn’t really come in, so in another way, synths come in, and there’s more on your palette. And now all the DJ stuff.

“More people are probably playing guitar and playing instruments because instruments are cheaper than they were and more accessible than 50, 60 years ago. You’ve just got more people making music, which has got to be a good thing. I think you’ve got the opportunity now to make some extraordinary noises and sounds, if you can be arsed.”

The Fender EOB Sustainer Stratocaster is available now for £979/$1,099.

© Rune Hellestad/Corbis

With Glastonbury Festival kicking-off properly today, we thought we'd bring you a countdown of 10 classic performances that the MusicRadar team have witnessed at Worthy Farm over the past decade. All with video, of course, so you can relive these great festival highlights with us.

Think we've missed anything or are way off the mark? What are your favourite festival performances from the last decade? Let us now via Facebook, Twitter or the comments section below. And if you're at Glastonbury this weekend keep us updated with what you're up to via the same means.

First up: ?

10. Arcade Fire - Other Stage, 2007

It feels like Arcade Fire should have played Glastonbury more times than they actually have - their multi-instrument, semi-choral brand of indie rock seems like the perfect fit for Eavis' fields.

Yet they've only actually appeared once, playing the Other Stage while touring their second album, Neon Bible, in 2007. The show was worth the wait though.

9. The XX - John Peel Stage, 2010

A high-profile Glastonbury set can really separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to up-and-coming, hyped-up bands.

When The XX played in 2010 - performing sets on both the John Peel and Park stages over the weekend - they cemented their place as one of the most exciting new bands to emerge over recent years. Turning songs that were unknown to most just months before into emotional, crowd-bonding moments of brilliance.

8. Elbow - Other Stage, 2008

After years of not-quite breaking through into the mainstream consciousness, Elbow's 2008 Mercury-winning album The Seldom Seen Kid finally saw the band reach the wider audience they deserved.

Their set on the Other Stage was timed perfectly with this gear shift. And the band playing One Day like This with an orchestral backing as the sun finally came out on a cloudy afternoon made for a perfect festival atmosphere.

7. Flaming Lips - Pyramid Stage, 2003

Back in 2003, The Flaming Lips took to the Pyramid Stage directly before Radiohead's Saturday night headline set.

Despite being active since the mid-1980s, it was only at the turn of the millennium, with the release of '99's The Soft Bulletin and 2002's Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, that the Flaming Lips found commercial success. Their '03 set saw the Lips performing their brilliantly eccentric live show - complete with animal costume-clad dancers, confetti canons and giant inflatable suns - to a larger audience than ever before. And they didn't fail to deliver.

6. White Stripes - Pyramid Stage, 2002

The White Stripes headlined the Pyramid Stage in 2005, stepping up to the plate and giving the sort of awe-inspiring headline performance you'd expect from the duo.

But their best Glastonbury performance came three years earlier, when the band performed the Pyramid Stage mid-afternoon. Touring their third album White Blood Cells at the time, the duo played a set that was, on the surface, much more low-key than their later headlining performance would be.

The stage set-up consisted of just Meg on drums and Jack on guitar and vocals. But the lack of stage props and extra instruments did nothing but draw attention to the raw, garage-rock power of the duo's music.

5. Leonard Cohen - Pyramid Stage, 2008

For years Glastonbury's Pyramid Stage has played host to 'veteran' artists on the Sunday afternoon (the likes of James Brown, Brian Wilson and Shirley Bassey have all played the slot).

But few of these classic artists can match the emotional singalongs inspired by dark crooner Leonard Cohen. His rendition of Hallelujah in 2008 - performed hunched over in front of a rapturous crowd - was a true Glasto classic.

Unfortunately, Cohen asked not to be filmed at the festival, so the footage above is the best we have.

4. Queens Of The Stone Age - Other Stage, 2002

When QOTSA played the Other Stage back in 2002 the band had just released their excellent third album Songs For The Deaf.

At the time they were touring with what is undoubtedly their 'definitive' line-up - including Nick Oliveri on bass and Dave Grohl on drums. Combine that with a great setlist of hard-edged Queens classics and you've got one of the most all-out rocking sets Pilton has ever seen.

3. Paul McCartney - Pyramid Stage, 2004

Despite fairly insane weather conditions in 2004 (a vast number of tents were lost under floods), McCartney bringing the music of The Beatles to the festival for the frst time was enough to cheer anyone up.

Sure, his set verged on the cheesy side at times (firework displays during Live And Let Die, incessant thumbs-up signals to the crowd) but nobody can knock a huge crowd singalong to Hey Jude. As anyone who was there will testify, nothing brings a huge crowd of strangers together more than witnessing Beatles classics performed by a true legend.

2. Radiohead - Pyramid Stage, 2003

While Radiohead's '97 headline set - shortly after the release of OK Computer - is often seen as their 'definitive' performance, their set in 2003 shouldn't be overlooked for classic status.

While the band famously said that they didn't enjoy performing in '97, due to sound problems on stage, when they returned six years later they were obviously in their element. The set mixed their more leftfield material from Kid A and the recently released Hail To The Thief with classic rock numbers from The Bends and OK Computer.

If '97 marked their entry into the big leagues, '03 cemented Radiohead as one of the biggest, most exciting bands in the world.

1. Jay-Z - Pyramid Stage, 2008

Of all the acts on this list, none had something to prove as much as Jay-Z did. His booking, as the first rap artist to headline the Pyramid Stage, was much discussed in the press in the lead up to the festival. He was blamed (probably inaccurately) for slower-than-usual ticket sales and derided publicly by Noel Gallagher.

But Jigga stepped up to the plate, coming onstage wielding a guitar and playing a rough, tough-in-cheek cover of Oasis' Wonderwall before cutting into his own hit 99 Problems. It's a set that proved not only that hip-hop had a place on Worthy Farm, but that Jay-Z is one of the most consummate pop performers on the planet.

Now play: MusicRadar Glastonbury 2011 bingo

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Yesterday it was revealed that Radiohead's Thom Yorke is set to release a collaborative 12-inch single with two of the most respected names in UK dance music - Four Tet and Burial.

The single, a double-A-side entitled Ego/Mirror, is set to be released on March 21 via Four Tet's Text record label. Only limited numbers of the vinyl-only single will be made available, and are likely to prove fairly difficult to get hold of.

Both tracks from the release were debuted during a mix by Floating Points on London-based dance-music radio station Rinse FM last night. Check out the audio of both tracks below.

Four Tet and Burial have collaborated before, resulting in their excellent 2009 Moth/Wolf Cub single. While Burial has previously remixed the track And It Rained All Night from Yorke's solo album The Eraser.

Listen: Thom Yorke, Burial and Four Tet - Ego

Listen: Thom Yorke, Burial and Four Tet - Mirror

So we assume that by now you’ve all either heard The King Of Limbs or decided that you don’t care enough to bother with it. Either way, it’s unlikely that you’ve managed to make it through the last week without noticing that it was released.

Excuse us for pointing out the obvious, but these days the release of a new Radiohead album is a massive event. When In Rainbows was released in 2007 - which, as a sidenote, Team MusicRadar generally agree is the band’s best album - it was almost over-shadowed by the pay-what-you-like business model that the band used to put it out.

While The King Of Limbs comes with a set price, it’s also self-released and Radiohead are still being creative with their digital distribution. This time around they opted to announce the album via Twitter and Facebook, and then made it available a day earlier than promised seemingly just because they could.

So, what about The King Of Limbs itself? The name comes from an old oak tree in Savernake Forest, near the studio where the album was recorded. Supposedly said tree ties in with the themes of the record somehow… We'll leave you to work that one out.

The album is Radiohead’s shortest ever, clocking in at less than 40 minutes, and once again long-time collaborator Nigel Godrich has returned to co-produce.

If past Radiohead albums have been categorised as either ‘guitar’ or ‘electronic’ albums (or as various mixes of the two), then The King Of Limbs feels like it should be seen as their percussive record.

As on In Rainbows, the band have found a nice mix between their traditional instrument set up and the synthesised, sampled and manipulated sound that they introduced around the time of Kid A. Yet this time around it seems like their songwriting is very much focused on rhythm, with many of the instruments taking an almost entirely percussive role for much of the album.

To explain what we mean, let’s take a track-by-track look at The King Of Limbs.

First up: Bloom

Bloom opens the album with a looped and delayed piano sample reminiscent of the work of minimal-composer Philip Glass.

As we’ve already mentioned, The King Of Limbs is a very rhythmically focused record. The drums that come in on Bloom are a cropped and looped sample that emphasises the rhythmic, motorik style that drummer Phil Selway has become known for through Radiohead’s live performances.

What quickly becomes clear on Bloom, and is true for the majority of TKOL, is that bassist Colin Greenwood has a major role to play. With much of the rest of the band focused on rhythmic and percussive parts it’s left to Greenwood’s basslines to lead the chord progressions and song structures - something indicative of the influence that Radiohead take from dance and electronic music.

Morning Mr Magpie is the first of only a handful of properly guitar-driven songs on The King Of Limbs. The main body of the track is based around a repetitive guitar riff making use of lots of rhythmic muting, fleshed out with several other wide-panned loose and low level guitar lines adding melody.

To us, the guitar parts instantly bring to mind New York based band TV On The Radio - not a surprising comparison, bearing in mind that TOTR regularly admit to being heavily influenced by Radiohead (their debut album was named OK Calculator).

As with a lot of Phil Selway’s drum parts over more recent Radiohead albums, the drum beat to Morning Mr Magpie owes a heavy debt to krautrock. Towards the end of the track a panned delay on the hi-hats thickens out the drum sound, slightly changing the rhythm.

Like many songs that eventually turn up on Radiohead albums, Morning Mr Magpie is actually a reworked version of a song that's been floating around for some time. Check out this video of Thom Yorke performing the original version, called Morning M'Lord, from a Hail To The Thief era webcast.

Probably one of the stand-out tracks on The King Of Limbs, the track makes great use of the various rhythmic devices to add to the tension of Thom Yorke’s (possibly) politically motivated lyrics.

If we had to pick a favourite track from TKOL then this would be it (probably alongside Codex, which is coming later).

Little By Little opens with a jangling wall of guitars (and what sounds like it could be a mandolin). It’s mostly a traditional band set-up, but the drums are joined by a drum-machine halfway through and reversed guitar parts thicken out the sound.

Feral is certainly Radiohead at their most minimal. Again the main drum beat sounds like a loop rather than something that has been played live.

The stabs of heavily effected guitar and sampled snippets of Thom Yorke’s vocals add counter-rhythm as much as they do melody. Once again a deep, brooding bassline provides the majority of the tone and structure for the song.

It would be impossible to mention Lotus Flower - the first track to be revealed from The King Of Limbs - without mentioning that video. Four minutes of Thom Yorke dancing, in an equally mesmerising and terrifying manner, alone in a Warehouse wearing a vaguely comedy hat.

Possibly our favourite music video of 2011 so far. Expertly choreographed by the English National Ballet’s Wayne McGregor and even more expertly remixed by the good people of the internet.

Video aside, we actually got our first taste of Lotus Flower when footage emerged online of Thom Yorke performing it as a solo acoustic number at a Haiti earthquake benefit back in January 2010.

The album version is another great example of Radiohead pulling influences from electronic music. The brooding bassline and electronic kicks bring to mind LA producer Flying Lotus, who Thom Yorke has recently collaborated with (although we think the name similarity is just a coincidence).

Codex is the closest The King Of Limbs comes to touching on material from Radiohead’s earlier career. It’s one of the least percussively-driven tracks, based instead around reverb-drenched piano chords and one of Yorke’s more coherent vocal performances on the album.

In terms of arrangement, you can hear a lot of Johnny Greenwood’s influence coming through. As the song moves on the piano part is joined by a stripped-down orchestral backing with horn and string parts reminiscent of a lot of the soundtrack and classical composition work that Greenwood has embarked on over the past few years.

There’s also a slight resembalance to the tribute to WWI veteran Harry Patch that Yorke and Greenwood recorded back in 2009.

In terms of Radiohead’s back catalogue it’s closest comparisons are probably In Rainbows’ Nude or Amnesiac's Pyramid Song. In all an example of the kind of great, minimal down-tempo song that Radiohead do so well.

Both of The King Of Limbs’ closing tracks, Give Up The Ghost and Separator, are songs that Thom Yorke has been performing solo live for the past year or so.

Give Up The Ghost is more of a traditional acoustic number than any of the tracks on the first half of the album, yet it still has a distinctly percussive focus. The song’s rhythm is built up around an acoustic guitar being strummed and hit percussively, and a slowly repeated sample of Yorke’s voice.

For an interesting perspective on how Give Up The Ghost is built, watch this video of Thom performing a stripped-down solo version about a year ago.

Another track that Thom has been playing solo for some time. Although comparing this album version to older acoustic versions we have to say that Separator really comes into its own with this full band version.

For the first half of this recording the acoustic guitar of Yorke’s solo version is completely absent, replaced by a low-level organ drone.

The body of the track is made up of Phil Selway and Colin Greenwood's input, providing one of the album’s tightest rhythm section grooves.

Here at MusicRadar, we’re always fans of records that don’t overstay their welcome. At just 37 minutes The King Of Limbs certainly doesn’t drag, and almost feels like it’s over before you’ve even noticed it. Which is kind of nice.

Of course, being so short and, as it does, shying away from melody and obvious choruses, it’s understandable that some Radiohead fans might feel a little disappointed by the record (a theme that seems to be cropping up on some message boards).

For us however, it feels like Radiohead are at a nice stage in their career. As a band they’ve always shown a penchant for playing with rhythmic devises, and The King Of Limbs is the album where they’ve really gone to town on experimenting with this element of their sound.

In interviews last year, both Phil Selway and Thom Yorke said that they were daunted by the idea of putting out proper full length albums, and that seems to come out through The King Of Limbs. If rumours are to be believed, however, this may just be part one of several records Radiohead are to release this year.

It’s certainly a much less grand affair than previous efforts, but that’s not to say it has any less to offer. After a week living with the album we can definitely say that it keeps giving on repeated listens. It may not be their master statement, but this is the sound of one of the best bands the UK has ever produced giving themselves room to play with the intricacies of their sound without trying to reinvent the wheel again.

Are you a Radiohead fan like us? Enjoyed The King Of Limbs? Then you'll probably want to enter our Radiohead competition...

To celebrate the release of The King Of Limbs we've teamed up with EMI for a special Radiohead-themed competition. The grand prize definitely qualifies for 'must-have' status:

• All six of Radiohead's EMI albums (Pablo Honey, The Bends, OK Computer, Kid A, Amnesiac and Hail To The Thief) on vinyl
• A DVD copy of The Best Of Radiohead: The Videos
• A CD copy of The Best Of Radiohead
• In addition, five runners-up will receive a CD copy of The Best Of Radiohead

To enter, just answer this question: Who is the producer often referred to as the sixth member of Radiohead?

A. George Martin
B. Nigel Godrich
C. John Leckie

Enter the competition here.

Entrants must be over 18. T&C's apply. Competition closes on 22/3/2011.

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