Living without Radiohead is not to live at all; for many, it would be to die. The question really is to be or not to be. Putting any irony in front of these facts would betray all 20,000 who filled Bologna’s Unipol Arena in November. OK Computer has been called the best album ever made. The music is art at its most consequential – it demands of us the highest register. During the keening suicide lullaby “No Surprises”, two fans got engaged and committed their lives to each other.
Not that the band has assumed any such importance in its unostentatiously named “2025 Radiohead Tour”. It comes with no new album and no dynamic pricing. It has not been marketed as a reunion. The low-key sales began just two months before the start. The shows end early enough for attendees to do something else afterwards; Radiohead need not even take up all of your evening, let alone your life. There are 20 of these gigs, between 4 November and 12 December, in Madrid, Bologna, London, Copenhagen and Berlin. There is no great drama to the arrangements, no great occasion; it’s just something like motiveless musicality. Yet fans have described agony at missing tickets, and outside the venues there are people who have flown across the planet in the hope of finding a ticket on the night.
Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood, Colin Greenwood, Philip Selway and Ed O’Brien formed the band at an Oxfordshire school in 1985 and peaked in the decade between OK Computer in 1997 and In Rainbows in 2007. Those albums are behind them now. The band members are in their fifties and engaged by other projects. This new tour is Radiohead’s first in seven years and possibly their last.
The night starts with single chords and simple lights that shine momentarily on a polygonal cage of metal grates that shield a stage in the centre of the arena. The light and sound is plain, but distinctively Radiohead. The grates lift once the band comes on stage and serve as a screen for projection overhead. There are 25 songs in the set, the last seven after an encore, and have been chosen to thrill the audience. There are several from the nervous attitudes of The Bends, the snowblind catastrophes of OK Computer, the heavy tropics of In Rainbows, and the aching removes of Kid A and Amnesiac.
All the original members play. It has been said the Who were great because Keith Moon transformed the role of drummer from timekeeper to free artist. Radiohead feel like five free artists. They change instruments between most songs, and fans guess what song is next by the new configuration.
But the band has won its fame by its feelings. Yorke, the frontman, moves around the stage so that all the audience gets a moment with him. He wears a T-shirt and limits his addresses to a few murmured thank yous. For the passages of uneasy delirium, of the kind you might fall into if you lose all hope of keeping your mind in order, Yorke flings his body in embarrassing, desperate incoordination. He does it for songs like “Jigsaw Falling Into Place” and “Reckoner”. It strikes me as a dark turn on dancing like no one is watching: dancing like no one will ever see you.
Another distinctive emotional note of Radiohead’s is heard in balletic laments such as “Nude”, “No Surprises” and “Paranoid Android”. You might call it something like a disappointment that is harshened by the fresh memory of lost hope. In these moments, Yorke stands still, and strains as far as he can towards postures that his body will not allow him to hold.
A strange aspect of watching the band live is that these songs – exquisite hymns of isolation – become choral. The crowd joins in, and a quiet susurration attaches itself to the loneliest reckonings in the music. There is always a strange plangence when communal anthems like “Build Me Up Buttercup” are heard alone, with no one joining in; something like the reverse happens here. The familiar consolation of the music rises to a kind of bliss, and private depression climbs to public release, as listeners encounter thousands like themselves.
No act has done so much this century to detail the abysses of self we are now born into. The show ends with another murmured thanks and a round of meaningful bows, each member taking a turn before heading down the staircase offstage. The lights come up swiftly and the crowd files out.
The new fiancée reportedly called her proposal “the most unexpectedly tender and perfect moment – the music, the lights, Thom’s voice, and then that. I’m still floating.” There is awe, which one critic called the proper stance towards Shakespeare: another miracle of consciousness. But there is also gratitude. Radiohead have made new space in and for the human heart.
[Further reading: Sabrina Carpenter shows us a good time]
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This article appears in the 26 Nov 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Last Stand