Popular music · Rock
1985–present · British (Abingdon, Oxfordshire)
Alternative rock, then art rock and electronica
Radiohead formed at Abingdon School in the 1980s as On a Friday and have kept the same five members ever since. After the accidental grunge hit "Creep" they spent two decades refusing to repeat themselves, moving from guitar rock through the paranoid millennial anxiety of OK Computer to the electronic abstraction of Kid A. In 2007 they released an album as a pay-what-you-want download, upending the industry's pricing model.
A 1992 single about a self-loathing outsider, whose publishers had to add two credits after a complaint of resemblance to a Hollies hit (1992)
'Creep' — Albert Hammond and Mike Hazlewood were added to the credits over its likeness to 'The Air That I Breathe'.
A 1997 album whose anxieties about air crashes, motorways and corporate life were taken as a portrait of the coming century (1997)
OK Computer, produced with Nigel Godrich at St Catherine's Court, Bath; it won the Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album.
A six-minute 1997 single in four sections, its video an animated film by a Swedish cartoonist about a mermaid and a severed limb (1997)
'Paranoid Android' — the video was made by Magnus Carlsson, creator of Robin the cartoon pig.
A 2000 album that abandoned guitars for ondes Martenot, processed vocals and free jazz brass, and still went straight to number one in America (2000)
Kid A — their first US number one album, released with no singles and no conventional videos.
A 2007 album sold from the band's own website for whatever the buyer chose to pay (2007)
In Rainbows — the pay-what-you-want release, later issued on CD; it won two Grammys.
A 1995 album whose title refers to the bends suffered by divers, and which contains a hymn-like song about a fake plastic tree (1995)
The Bends — the record that rescued them from one-hit-wonder status.
A 2016 single whose stop-motion video pastiches a 1960s children's model village, then turns into The Wicker Man (2016)
'Burn the Witch', from A Moon Shaped Pool; Chris Hopewell's video parodies Trumpton.
A 2015 theme song for a James Bond film that was commissioned, recorded and then rejected (2015)
'Spectre' — turned down by Eon Productions in favour of Sam Smith's 'Writing's on the Wall', and released free by the band on Christmas Day 2015.