It’s the year’s greatest comeback of a contrarian ’90s rock band. But there’s been more than enough said about Oasis’s Live ’25 tour, so let’s leave it there.
It’s the year’s greatest comeback of a contrarian ’90s rock band. But even though I love The Beta Band – and the October show I saw in North London’s Roundhouse was a truly elevational experience – their star shone too brightly, too briefly, too waywardly, to have a wide, enduring impact on pop culture, so let’s leave it there.
It’s the year’s greatest comeback of a contrarian ’90s rock band. But much as Radiohead are, indeed, this month playing their first concerts in 87 months, in the near decade since they last a released a new album, this physically most elusive group of fifytsomething schoolfriends never feel fully away.
This year, their 40th anniversary year, Hamlet/Hail to the Thief – a Bard/band mash-up marshalled by frontman Thom Yorke and the Royal Shakespeare Company – ran in Manchester and Stratford-upon-Avon. Recordings from the concerts in support of that 2003 album, excavated by Yorke during his research for the theatrical/dance project, were recently released as a live compilation.
Meanwhile, ongoing at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum is This Is What You Get, a deep and definitive exhibition of Radiohead artwork created by Thom and longtime visual art collaborator Stanley Donwood. It was to promote that retrospective that Thom agreed (finally, after many, many moons’ back-and-forth) to talk to me for the November issue of Wallpaper*. Maybe he was aware that this year is also the 30th anniversary of the first of he and I’s many historic interviews, and he wanted to mark the occasion.
No of course he wasn’t/didn’t.
When, at the end of our conversation – Stanley was also participating – I did my journalist’s/fan’s duty by playfully asking when Radiohead might get back into the studio, Thom laughed mirthlessly. “I have no idea. Not on the cards from where I'm sitting.”
Blimey, I thought, rumours of the existence of my favourite band might be exaggerated.
How very Radiohead, then, that four weeks later, they announced 20 shows, across Europe and the UK – and they were starting in eight quick weeks. There had been no hints, no social media teasers, no TikTok tick-tock countdowns. There would be no kerching partnerships with sports brands nor makers of insulated water bottles. No dynamic pricing nor demonic gouging, although tickets would be just as hard to get hold of as for Oasis’ hell-froze-over tour.
Across this carefully curated tour routing – five, four-night, city residencies in Madrid, Bologna, London, Copenhagen and Berlin – there would just be Radiohead, back, performing music.
And what music. What timeless, changing music. What wondrous, weird and wonky music, to be performed in the round in the middle of arena floors, the better for all those lucky enough to be there to feel they’re all in this together. Because certainly there would be no "great-to-be-back" gushing onstage from the man with the microphone.
I was at Madrid’s Movistar Arena on Tuesday 4 November for the first night. I wish I’d been there for the second night, too, when Radiohead swapped out 14 of the first night’s 25 songs. Things had settled down by the third and fourth nights in the Spanish capital, with only one hitherto unplayed song being rotated into each evening’s set. They were still messing with the running order, though, and had three different songs (Let Down, 2 + 2 = 5, Planet Telex) as the opener across the four nights.
Radiohead live in Madrid
Meanwhile, on the same night as Radiohead were launching their tour in front of 17,5000 fans, down in Australia, half a world away, Oasis were playing the 35th show of the 41-date Live ’25 tour to 180,000 fans in Melbourne’s Marvel Stadium. They played the exact same, 23-song set as they’d played when I saw them on the opening night in Cardiff on 4 June – and had played at every show in between. How very Oasis.
We come to Oasis and Radiohead, the twin but diametrically opposed poles of Great British ’90s Rock Music, for wildly different reasons. Comfort/discomfort. To be roused/to be challenged. To find answers in lyrical platitudes (“you and I we’re gonna live forever”)/to pose questions in scornful jabs (“you and whose army?”). Boilerplate/smash all the plates. For a singalong and… a frownalong? Both are equally valid.
And they, in turn, come to us for different reasons. For all the Twitter twattery slanging matches, Noe l’n’ Liam were always going to reunite, to please mum Peggy/rescue stalling solo careers/fill their coffers/bring the love. Radiohead have come back… I’m not sure why.
Financially, they don’t need to, and anyway, this compact tour is hardly a get-rich-quick supermarket sweep. With multiple diverting solo ventures between the five of them, artistically, they don’t need to. Their position in the artists/Palestine discourse is a fault line around them and – not least given guitarist Jonny Greenwood’s marriage to an Israeli and his ongoing musical projects there – within them. They’ve never played to the (press) gallery, as I can attest from those multiple previous encounters in London, Dallas, Barcelona, Tokyo, Porto and more.
And yet, here they were, back amongst us. Having, as best as I could tell from the cheap seats (OK, free seats; thanks, record company), a great time together, patrolling the stage’s perimeter, foraging through their rich back catalogue, feeling their way back into being a band again.
They played a couple of songs that left me cold, The Gloaming and A Wolf at the Door; art-jazz does not an arena standout make. But I love them for that (I loved even more that they dropped both songs from the second night's set). The longueurs – the troughs and indulgences and jaggy bits – are what make it special (so fucking special). When I saw Coldplay at Wembley in the summer, it was like being Tango’d on Haribo in a ball-pit for two relentless hours. Also valid.
Where Radiohead go, I will follow, even if it’s bumpy. Especially so. That’s what our bands should do for us. Pull us places. Push us places. Cast us adrift places. In Madrid, Thom, Jonny, Colin Greenwood, Ed O’Brien and Philip Selway did that. On ghost ballads How to Disappear Completely and You and Whose Army? – the whole arena drenched in airlock red – we were all voyagers together. So, pretty much the only thing Thom said to us all night was “how’s it going?”, brief and muttered? So what?
It’s the year’s greatest comeback of a contrarian ’90s rock band. Yeah, it totally is.
And yes, I bought the t-shirt. It says: “GO HOME”. And: “DSPT” (despot?). And: “HELP”. And: “INST DEL” (“instant delete”?). Cheers, Radiohead! What a band. How we've missed them.
Radiohead’s tour continues on 14 November at Bologna’s Unipol Arena. They’re coming to London on 21 November. That’s right, just in time for pantomime season
