When it comes to marrying politics and music, Radiohead have always been good value for your money. Unlike their near contemporaries Blur, whose chart-pop whims combined with middle-of-the-road politics, Radiohead have never strayed far from right-on radical causes, just as their music has rarely deviated from the tastefully progressive. Some might say there is something insipid, humorless, even slightly sinister about their trademark mix of whiter-than-white ethics and try-hard experimentalism. But when we consider the band’s career as a whole, it’s difficult not to applaud the zeal and longevity of their left-field stance in life and art across the last few decades.

In looking for the origins of Radiohead’s political trajectory, we can identify two distinct forms of conservatism—one old, one new—against which their project has continually defined itself. The first is good old stuffy English traditionalism. The band formed over 30 years ago at Abingdon School, an elite private institution in the heart of the English countryside (think Hogwarts but without the charm and eccentricity). These roots in privilege have haunted the band members ever since and given them a common point of rebellion and antithesis. "I've had a very expensive education," Thom Yorke commented in 2001 NME interview, "and it took me years to come to terms with that. A long, long, long time."

The other source of the band’s radicalism is, of course, the 1980s indie scene. While Radiohead are for many people the quintessential nineties band, we should remember that they were born into the polarized climate of late-eighties alt-rock, where opposition to the pro-market neoliberalism of Reagan and Thatcher was de rigueur. As the neoliberal empire has expanded over the last 30 years, Radiohead have developed in parallel, to become perhaps the most notable living reminder of post-punk’s default stance of opposition toward Western conservatism and big business.

As with the songs, however, Radiohead’s fusion of art and politics took a while to get off the ground. Pablo Honey, 1993's mixed-bag of occasional brilliance and utter dross, did little more than mimic grunge’s nihilistic impressionism. The band were labelled shallow sellouts by certain sections of the indie fraternity at the time, and listening to bargain-bin millenarian lyrics like, "It's like the world is gonna end so soon/And why should I believe myself?" (from PH opening track "You"), you can see why. There was little to suggest at this stage that Radiohead would develop into anything more socially interesting than Pearl Jam.

But with the celebrated reinvention that was 1995's The Bends, the band evolved grunge’s basic formula—anti-corporatism wrapped in a corporate package—in intriguing ways. The Bends featured plenty of U2-lite moments, but at other times the borderline soft-rock was juxtaposed with more subversive presences. Just as Jonny Greenwood’s orchestral, acidic guitar lines snaked through tracks like "Bones," "Just," and "Iron Lung," so too Thom Yorke’s lyrics gave the album a thread of socio-political sophistication not present on earlier releases. While the Austin Powers pantomime of Britpop was in full swing, Yorke’s stark lyrical pessimism stood out as an ethical USP. A stray line like, "I wish it was the sixties, I wish I could be happy" (from "The Bends") condenses the melancholy underlying nineties liberalism in a perfect aside.

Elsewhere on The Bends, Yorke began to develop the distinctive lyrical voice that he has more or less retained in the band’s subsequent output. To be clear, this was something deeper and more socially mindful than a good deal of nineties indie, not to mention the stadium rock with which Radiohead would soon be bracketed commercially. Moving away from the navel-gazing of grunge, Yorke’s lyrical world amounted to a provocative, unsettling vision of Western capitalism swamped by millennial dread. Between the imagistic fragments in "Fake Plastic Trees" and the nightmarish swell of lines like, "You bite through the big wall, the big wall bites back" (from "Sulk"), listeners could begin to piece together a vivid dystopia that recalled the apocalyptic modernism of T. S. Eliot, Kafka, and J. G. Ballard.