Radiohead are the world’s most famous cult band.

Think about it. Has there ever been a group more at odds with mainstream success, yet so immensely popular for over three decades? With music that’s notoriously complex yet so universally revered?

And what other ‘90s band had a more phenomenal rise to fame? Nobody could have predicted that a British five-piece who risked falling into one-hit wonder oblivion with ‘Creep’ would end up becoming one of the most accomplished and forward-thinking groups of their time

From back-to-back masterpieces OK Computer and Kid A, to the game-changing In Rainbows and stunning A Moon Shaped Pool, they’re responsible for some of the most critically acclaimed albums ever (sorry Pablo Honey) and credited with re-writing the music industry rulebook, on more than one occasion.

Their influence and impact is tough to summarise, let alone measure, but there are fewer artists so reluctant about rock stardom, or as uncomfortable with the mantle of ‘Greatest Band of All Time’. These contradictions, along with their appetite for fearless innovation, has made them one of the most endlessly fascinating figures in contemporary music.

Join us as we immerse ourselves in the monumental career, music, and myth of Radiohead.

To cap off our month-long celebration of the ‘90s: the Radiohead J Files, with Gemma Pike, from 8pm Thursday 27 September and later On Demand and on the podcast.

The Reluctance of Radiohead: The world's most famous cult band

Author: Al Newstead

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Chapter 1: From A Great Height

The contradictions that make Radiohead “so fucking special”

Undertaking any comprehensive overview of Radiohead feels like a pretty redundant exercise.

Even limiting the focus feels fruitless when nearly every stretch of the career of Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood, Ed O’Brien, Colin Greenwood, and Phil Selway has been so exhaustively dissected, discussed, debated, celebrated, and re-analysed.

Got a hunger for a deep investigation on any one song, lyric, or the greatness of Thom Yorke’s voice or dance moves? Google it, there’ll be more than enough to satisfy your appetite.

They’re not a group that can be evaluated by conventional metrics like sales and awards, though they’ve had a healthy share of both. You can hardly hand someone a Greatest Hits and make them an instant convert. You need to absorb Radiohead.

There’s a huge intellectual streak to their music, meaning you’ll rarely hear it at a house party, in a club, or on commercial radio. And yet, even the most casual music fan knows exactly who they are and can rattle off a few song titles.

They’re tricky to quantify because of their refusal to be categorised, defying every label and attempt to pigeonhole them with each audacious new release.

You can’t even call them a rock band, according to Jonny Greenwood, who in a 2017 Rolling Stone feature instead described Radiohead as: “just kind of an arrangement to form songs using whatever technology suits the song. And that technology can be a cello or it can be a laptop. It’s all sort of machinery when looked at in the right way. That’s how I think of it.”

Radiohead emerged during Britain’s mid-90s guitar-band boom but they’re not strictly a Britpop band, as The Bends was at pains to illustrate. They named their 2004 album Hail To The Thief after a slur against the Bush administration, but it’s not a textbook political record.

They’ve continually blurred the boundaries between genres, to the point of erasing them; their music is rich with ideas, colours, and character. How do you accurately describe 2011’s sampled and looped The King of Limbs or the symphonic arrangements of 2016’s A Moon Shaped Pool without a mountain of adjectives and comparisons to Radiohead’s previous output?

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Their music provokes euphoria yet trades in terror. A songbook that traverses sign-of-the-times dread in a variety of apocalyptic flavours - technological calamity, political nightmare, ecological disaster, emotional obliteration. However, the ways they musically express that subject matter is often a sublime experience, gifting us musical utopia in the face of encroaching dystopia.

Paradoxically, for such renowned risk-takers and sonic revolutionaries, Radiohead’s inner circle has remained consistent. Their creative partnerships with producer Nigel Godrich and resident visual auteur Stanley Donwood have been long-lasting threads to Radiohead’s fabric, and the band’s line-up (with the exception of adding second drummer Clive Deamer in 2011) has been identical for over 30 years.

Not even the way Radiohead have been referenced in pop culture has been entirely consistent. Put down as “maudlin music” in 1995 teen film cornerstone Clueless but elevated to arthouse infamy the following year in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet.

Their appearances in film and TV are sometimes logical - providing a moody score to Westworld and A Scanner Darkly - other times unlikely, like appearing as themselves in one of South Park’s most memorably morbid episodes.

Time and again, they’ve challenged the sound and definitions of what being a huge act is. There are generations of artists who’ve followed in their wake who, consciously dipping from the Radiohead gene pool or not, have benefited from their pioneering.

An influence that isn’t bound by genre or geography, inspiring everyone from Arcade Fire and Danny Brown, through to The Strokes, Skrillex, Kathleen Hanna, and beyond. Heck, even Sir Paul McCartney is intimidated by Radiohead’s far-reaching impact.

But even with such diverse seals of approval from their peers, Radiohead downplay all audience and media deification.

No matter how regularly they rank at the pinnacle of ‘All Time’ and ‘Best Of’ lists, it’s hard to imagine them boasting about it, or exploiting their fame to wing a restaurant booking.

Masters of sidestepping the spotlight, they’re arguably the most anonymous celebrities ever. Consider how little we know about their personal lives in relation to how large their legacy looms.

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So, if it’s so difficult to say anything profoundly new about Radiohead, why is the conversation around them still so vital?

Go to the r/radiohead subreddit or any comments section today and you’ll still find devotees unpacking interpretations and speculations, stoking the debate as fiercely as ever.

And look, let’s face it, the only caricature stronger than the pale-white Brits being miserable harbingers of gloomy art-rock is that of their fanbase: intellectual snobs and insufferable nerds who are all-too-quick to mansplain (and yes, they’re mostly dudes) Radiohead’s untouchable brilliance in painstaking minutiae.

Pretentious for-or-against acolytes for whom no conspiracy theory is considered too wild. (Not even Chuck Klosterman’s theorising on how Kid A predicted 9/11)

There’s some truth to those stereotypes, and it’s something Pitchfork humorously nailed in their animated history of the group (which completely omits Pablo Honey, how’s that for an inside joke?)

But no matter where you stand on the band or their loyal followers, that intense devotion sort of epitomises how they’ve grown into something so much more than just the music.

For many, they were the key that unlocked an entire universe of musical possibility. From Polish composers and Krautrock, to Miles Davis’ electric jazz period and the glitchtronica of Warp Records, to Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein’s No Code… Radiohead was the constellation that connected these cultural waypoints - the great binding bridge between the mainstream and everything that wasn’t.

The idea of Radiohead is, in a way, more powerful than any of their records or the men making them. At this point, they’re more of a ubiquitous cultural force than a flesh-and-blood band - an everlasting, incorruptible symbol.

The legends and myths woven around them with each album and live show only seem to strengthen them against scrutiny. (The members of the band themselves, not so much, but we’ll get to that.)

And if you’re sick of hearing about how Radiohead are the ‘Greatest Band Of All Time’, imagine how they feel?

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Whatsapp Radiohead in Frisco, 1994, for US Weekly Magazine

Chapter 2: The Reluctance of Radiohead

Examining the band's legacy of resistance and revolution.

A defining characteristic of Radiohead’s career is their attempt to escape definition, their reluctance to be any one thing at one time. Each phase of their journey can be interpreted by the shades with which the band was deeply uncomfortable with their situation, using it to push forward to the next frontier.

It goes right back to their earliest days, meeting as students in 1985 at Abingdon - a boys’ public school in the heart of educated Oxfordshire. Yorke, Selway, O’Brien, and the Brothers Greenwood formed a band as a rebellious antidote to their strictly disciplined, private school upbringing - an elitist shadow they’d struggled to shed.

"I've had a very expensive education,” Thom Yorke told NME in 2001. “And it took me years to come to terms with that. A long, long, long time."

That guilt complex would further manifest when the band, originally known as On A Friday (after their usual rehearsal time) skipped the traditional indie rock path to glory.

Re-grouping after a sabbatical to complete University, they switched to a new name inspired by an obscure Talking Heads song, ‘Radio Head’ (which has its own ridiculous back story), and signed a six-album deal with EMI without having toured extensively.

That first fast-track to success fostered a deep strand of good old-fashioned British guilt in the band. As Yorke put it in 1998 doco Meeting People Is Easy.

“English people aren’t impressed. There’s this automatic assumption that any degree of success means that you’ve cheated. Or you’re full of shit.”

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Colin Greenwood reinforced that sentiment in a 1997 Radiohead Interview CD. “You should never assume that people are paying attention to you because of who you are. If you think that, you’re damned, you’re doomed.”

One can only imagine then, the number it did on Radiohead that their first major flush with fame came courtesy of an ode to self-loathing.

On their 1993 debut album, the patchy Pablo Honey, Radiohead were a product of the indie rock heroes they idolised - Pixies, R.E.M., The Smiths. But if approximating their influences was their bid to become stars, ‘Creep’ granted them their wish.

It became a hit in (of all places) Israel that flowed to the US, painting the band into a corner as they tried desperately to stuff the genie back into the bottle.

That famed Radiohead reluctance is deeply etched into ‘Creep’ - from Yorke’s lyrical desires for a ‘perfect body/soul’, to be ‘so fuckin’ special’, anyone other than himself, to Greenwood’s attempts to express his diffidence to the brooding lament by derailing the pre-chorus with slashes of distorted guitar.

‘CA-CHUNK … CA-CHUNK’

“That’s the sound of Jonny trying to fuck the song up,” Ed O’Brien once stated. “He really didn’t like it the first time we played it, so he tried spoiling it. And it made the song.”

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The result once again fast-tracked Radiohead to fame but rather than enjoy their sudden success, the quintet were deeply skeptical of the attention and unsettled by the idea their big hit single would eclipse their ambitions for a long-term career.

Resented at home by press and their Britpop contemporaries, jealous they’d hit American pay dirt, and misunderstood abroad, the band’s disdain for ‘Creep’ increased at the same rate as its reach.

In 1994, Yorke purchased a three-bedroom home in the Oxford suburb of Headington, and sourly joked it was “the house that ‘Creep’ built”.

The punchline extended to the band’s new single ‘My Iron Lung’, with its catty line: ‘This is our new song/just like the last one/a total waste of time’, and the metaphorical title of their second album, The Bends, named after the decompression sickness divers suffer when they rise to the surface too quickly.

They detested the major label system that forced them to conform and compromise. It’s this first fledgling decade that has, in a way, defined how Radiohead would never again cave to anybody’s idea of the band but their own.

It certainly defined their next adventurous steps. Their distaste for being lumped in with the grunge and Britpop ‘90s set would lead them to creating a singular masterwork that sounded nothing like those movements, or like much else for that matter.

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They followed up OK Computer, one of the most universally applauded albums ever, with a radical attempt to confront every idea that made them so critically bulletproof: Kid A, an about-face so abrasive that turn-of-the-century critics coined the phrase ‘pulling a Kid A’ to describe any major artist that underwent a stylistic backflip.

Radiohead’s insurrection backfired, leading them even greater acclaim and forcing them to find new ways to challenge their disciples.

From there, their contempt and boredom with the tropes of the industry would drive their determination to lead a revolt from it. If revolutionising their sound again and again wasn’t enough, then rewiring the way their music was received and carving out their own artistic and commercial freedom was the next logical step.

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Whatsapp Radohead in 1998, in a Rolling Stone Australia shoot.

Chapter 3: Big Ideas (Don't Get Any)

How Radiohead's visionary experiments with technology reshaped the music biz.

For a group that crafted one of the defining masterpieces on technological angst in OK Computer, one of the great ironies about Radiohead is how ahead of the curve they’ve always been when it comes to digital frontiers.

Followers not leaders, they willingly dabbled with the intersections between music, art, and the newest technology, long before they became trends or industry standards.

Never mind the gear that overruns their studio and stage set-ups, they were one of the earliest adopters of streaming (via an embeddable iBlip player for Kid A); DIY webcasts (the Scotch Mist broadcasts); apps (2013’s PolyFauna), as well as a host of fan-made, band-endorsed video content (2004’s The Most Gigantic Lying Mouth of All Time) and concert films (2010’s Radiohead For Haiti).

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More significantly, Radiohead can be counted among the first artists to embrace the Internet, using their website to foster fan community and interaction.

Around 1999, their official site endorsed and acknowledged now-infamous fan pages like At Ease, Green Plastic, and Follow Me Around. In July the same year, Ed O’Brien began an online diary about the recording sessions for what would become Kid A and Amnesiac, which ran through to June 2000, providing a rare insider’s perspective on a group who had now famously guarded themselves from music press and media.

All five band members could regularly be found lurking on message boards, joining in discussions and responding to fans, albeit sometimes more cryptically than candidly.

Perhaps these online spaces better suited the sensibilities of the private, polite Englishmen, providing enough of a clinical buffer between them and their often-obsessive fanbase but room enough for zealous discussion to flourish on their own terms. It was prescient.

Nearly half-a-decade before the advent of Facebook and Twitter made one-to-one access de rigeur, they communicated with the wider world of the Internet via their blog Dead Air Space.

One such message, posted on 30 September 2007, sent the web into a frenzy: “The new album is finished, and it’s coming out in 10 days,” Jonny Greenwood wrote nonchalantly.

It was the only advance warning the band, out of their label contract and interested to experiment, issued before releasing their seventh album In Rainbows, essentially inventing the ‘surprise’ album release in the process - a method that’s become industry standard for everyone from Beyoncé to Bowie.

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In retrospect, Kid A had laid the foundations, skipping the traditional pageantry and marketing saturation of the ‘event album’, yet producing the same blockbuster results. It debuted at #1 all over the world with next-to-no promotion and zero advance singles.

That was partly thanks to the album leaking on infamous file-sharing service Napster three months before its release. But rather than hinder Kid A’s prospects, the peer-to-peer sharing only helped.

It didn’t go unnoticed by the band. In fact, as early as October 2000, a Q magazine cover story laid out what sounded like a seven-year plan:

"We'd really like to have more regular communications with people," explains Colin Greenwood, "as opposed to just having this massive dump every two-and-a-half years, and fanfares and clarion calls."

Ideas currently being examined include intermittent EPs and pay-as-you-go Internet serialisations. "We're trying to get away from the situation where every record we make is the be-all and end-all," asserts O'Brien.

In Rainbows was the result of that revolutionary approach and further fired a warning shot across the bow of music industry conventions with a component equally as important as its ‘surprise’ release - the ‘pay what you want’ model.

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Radiohead may not have been the first to allow their audience to set the price tag, including the bargain price of zero, but they were certainly the first to popularise it.

In doing so, it sparked a debate about the value of music and, for better or worse, fundamentally altered the historic relationship between artist and audience, the ramifications of which are still reverberating today.

“If I die tomorrow, I’ll be happy that we didn’t carry on working within this huge industry that I don’t feel any connection with." Thom Yorke — Rolling Stone, 2009

Radiohead proved that reclaiming the methods of format and distribution for one’s own creative and financial ends was entirely possible, predicting crowdfunding platforms and artist-to-fan services like Bandcamp and Patreon.

On the other hand, In Rainbows is also frequently blamed for normalising the expectation that music should come cheap, or worse, free.

When the streaming service boom followed, prioritising ease of access above ownership, Radiohead were early to scrutinise how streaming’s low royalty payouts and gatekeeping measures exploited musicians to the benefit of fans and labels.

Yorke slagged off Spotify as “the last desperate fart of a dying corpse” in a 2013 interview with Sopitas.

Two years later, in an interview with La Repubblica, he was likening YouTube to Nazi Germany (“They steal art”) and lamenting how releasing his second solo album Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes on BitTorrent had “not exactly” been a successful experiment. “But I'm glad I did it, for having tried to."

It’s the trying that’s key. They endeavoured, and continue, to make intrepid efforts to operate outside the system.

“If I die tomorrow,” Yorke told Rolling Stone in 2009. “I’ll be happy that we didn’t carry on working within this huge industry that I don’t feel any connection with.” Meanwhile, O’Brien trumpeted the “decentralising of power… Record companies can’t control us anymore.”

In retrospect, they may have flirted with the possibilities of a music industry reboot rather than fully achieved one, but Radiohead’s self-emancipation paved the way for others to operate on an unprecedented level of artistic independence. (Chance The Rapper, anyone?)

They bit back hard enough to loosen the capitalist-consumer stranglehold of the music business like no artist before, and very few since. They should be applauded more than booed for the new benchmarks they set, though you’ll rarely hear them claiming credit for it.

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Whatsapp Radiohead in 2007 at the Oxford Playhouse Theatre

Chapter 4: Ambition Makes You Look Pretty Ugly

Rebuking the rock canon and facing the cynics.

In recent years, there’s been a concerted push to upend and re-evaluate the popular music and classic album canon to be more inclusive.

To revise its history to emphasise what rock critics left out - typically people of colour and women - in a bid to represent more than just the great works of men and those writing about them.

Where does this position Radiohead? Staples of countless ‘Best Album’ and ‘Greatest Ever’ lists (they’ve had 12 songs in nine separate Hottest 100 countdowns, not including the four that appeared at the pointy end of the 1998 and 1999 ‘All Time’ countdowns), they’re a band that’s clearly benefited from the historically patriarchal dominance of rock music.

They aren’t exactly a group driven by feminist ideology and they practically epitomise white Britishness, but you suspect Radiohead would welcome the upheaval of the rock canon.

Their track record for snubbing award ceremonies and turning down Hall of Fame invites is a powerful indication of their reluctance to be lumped into any sort of hero worship.

Even as the importance of the album has diminished in the last decade, and rock music has lost its central foothold on popular culture, Radiohead have not. Quite the opposite.

The band’s history is punctuated by them finding their balance at times when their peers found the structures they’d relied upon crumbling underfoot. Every time it looks like they’ve scaled the peak of their powers, they don’t give a second thought to packing up camp, reinventing themselves and looking for the next creative mountain to climb.

During the OK Computer-era they rejected suggestions it was the ‘90s answer to Sgt. Pepper’s and Dark Side of the Moon almost as quickly as music press could write them.

This resistance to being feted and adored has been deemed by some as ungrateful.

As Q scribe David Cavanagh articulated it in October 2000, their rejections of praise and lionising are “grist to the mill of Radiohead's detractors, who regard the group as pampered moaners who want to have their cake and eat it. Who want to make brilliant music but not be acclaimed for it. Who want to reach plenty of listeners but not have to talk to any of them. Who want to be important but not that important.”

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There’s also a field of critique that damns Radiohead as nothing but pretentious hypocrites – championing anti-corporate messages only after benefiting from the major label system; their fame and critical adulation considered luxuries only afforded by advantages they were born into rather than earned.

For what it’s worth, they’ve never downplayed the head-start their expensive educations gave them. “I’ve had a very privileged upbringing” Thom Yorke confessed to NME in 2001 while discussing his studies at the “ultra-ultra-competitive” Exeter University.

The same year, addressing the dissonance between slamming big business while still signed to a major label, Yorke told The Wire: “Unfortunately, if you’re interested in actually being heard, you have to work within the system.”

“You read one bad review and one hundred good ones and the bad one always seems to make more sense to you.” Jonny Greenwood — Sydney Morning Herald, 1998

Whether you read that as justification or excuse, it shows that Radiohead comprehend the limitations and contradictions of rebuking an industry that they must constantly negotiate with in order to survive.

In the 21st century, it’s not enough for famous musicians to simply make music, they must, like all good rock activists do, use their profile as a platform to address issues bigger than themselves. This is one sacred cow Radiohead have nurtured rather than slaughtered.

They’ve played charity concerts, made efforts to reduce their carbon footprint, and co-signed all manner of environmental causes. All the while, openly expressing their political leanings – their contempt for a litany of right-wing politicians is well documented, from Tony Blair to David Cameron to Theresa May and Donald Trump. And lest we forget, their hatred for George W. Bush is immortalised in the title Hail To The Thief.

But just as John Lennon was skewered for being a multi-millionaire who sang ‘Imagine there’s no possessions/I wonder if you can’, Radiohead’s political and environmental activism has rung hollow to their cynics, dismissed as a means of exorcising the ghosts of their upper-middle-class past.

However, unlike other blockbuster artists keen to retain their status or please crowds, Radiohead have never lived in fear of shedding fans or becoming unpopular.

“If we got into a situation where people start burning our records, then bring it on. That’s the whole point,” Yorke once declared in 2003.

Despite being held to a standard most artists never reach, Radiohead’s missteps have never been ruinous, or tested the public’s goodwill and aggressively courted controversy like, say, Kanye West or Lady Gaga.

No matter how much you think you hate Radiohead, they remain their own worst critic.

“If you believe the hype, you have to believe the backlash too. Any criticism we get is always stuff we have already criticised ourselves with anyway,” Jonny Greenwood prophesied to The Sydney Morning Herald back in January 1998. “You read one bad review and one hundred good ones and the bad one always seems to make more sense to you.”

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Whatsapp A 2016 Radiohead press shot for A Moon Shaped Pool.

Chapter 5: Fitter. Happier. More Productive.

In a world of chaos, Radiohead put 'Everything In Its Right Place'

Times have changed dramatically since their birth, but Radiohead endures.

Contemporaries have come and gone, their idols disbanded or made for the great gig in the sky, the music landscape has undergone seismic shifts, but Radiohead remains as a cultural constant.

It’s poetic irony, really: a reliably revolutionary band who unfailingly choose to take risks over playing it safe. They’ve mastered lessons others are still struggling to learn, and every gamble thus far has paid off handsomely.

They’ve long since inked themselves into the history books, but even with nothing left to prove, they refuse to coast or repeat themselves.

“One of the most important ethics of Radiohead is that we’re not nostalgic,” Ed O’Brien told Q in 2000. “We never look back. We never talk about what we’ve done in the past. [Thom] has that kind of drive: ‘Ok, I’ve done that. Now I’m going to move on’.”

The frontman touched on this progressively minded attitude when he spoke to triple j’s Richard Kingsmill in 1998 about his willingness to ditch songwriting ideas.

“It’s more about what sticks with us, and what takes on a significance,” he said. “If you’re a writer you wouldn’t write the same book over and over again.”

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This kind of restless innovation doesn’t just happen. It must be worked at, it takes discipline; it takes self-scrutiny - something the jittery Yorke and co. have in abundance. There’s no greater catalyst for Radiohead’s dramatic revisions than Radiohead themselves.

Art-rock saviours, architects of modern music, independent industry revolutionaries, the 21st Century Beatles -- Radiohead have never fully embraced any of the lofty mantles heaped upon them.

Maybe that’s why we continue to shower them with accolades and call them geniuses? Because we get the impression they’ll never accept such hyperbole as authentic. Rejecting our rhapsodising as fuss and nonsense.

Speaking to Q in 2016, the band's first interview for A Moon Shaped Pool, Thom Yorke said he was surprised people still cared about Radiohead.

“We expected the opposite. I cherish the band, but I don’t expect anyone else to.”

Radiohead, the world’s most famous cult band, a group that rarely asks for adoration but so patently deserves it.