Radiohead’s 30 Greatest Songs

As Radiohead reunite for their first tour in seven years, it seems a fitting time to revisit the band’s 30 greatest songs – with help from their close collaborators, friends, famous fans, and even some of their biggest influences.

Here, then, are their finest songs, presented chronologically, from the radio-friendly grunge of “Creep” to the more singular grooves found on 2016’s A Moon Shaped Pool. Along the way, you might learn a thing or two about Thom, Jonny, Ed, Colin and Phil – including their experimental studio practices, their debt to “In The Air Tonight”, and their changing post-gig celebrations: “Gentlemen, some sake…?”

1 CREEP
Single, 1992; Pablo Honey, 1993

MARK MULCAHY, MIRACLE LEGION: I first heard “Creep” on the radio, and it somehow felt different to me. Thom’s voice and that explosive guitar just really got me. So I went to track it down in this store in New Haven, bought a cassette of it and listened to it over and over. I looked at the credits and [producer] Paul Kolderie’s name was there, so I called him up – I was a real fan-geek. Sometimes everything meets, the singer and the song and the guitars and the production and everything. I didn’t suspect then that they were fans of my band, Miracle Legion. After becoming devoted to the song, I heard they were playing in New York at a theatre in Midtown. So I went to see them, and I was way into it. I went to the backstage door to try to meet them, instinctively, and [security] said, “No no, get outta here.” But the ironic part of that story is that when I first did meet Thom, it was after a gig at Irving Plaza, New York – Thom came out and dedicated the encore to me, which was a pretty great surprise. Then I went backstage, and [security] were like, “Oh yeah, come in, come in…” The first time we met, Thom kept talking about how much he loved my song, “All For The Best”, so I wasn’t surprised that he did such a great version of it [on 2009 Mulcahy tribute album, Ciao My Shining Star]. What I’d really love to do someday is to record something together with Thom – I know our voices have something similar about them.

2 PLANET TELEX
The Bends, 1995
Radiohead have always had a knack for dramatic and powerful openers, and on The Bends they put their second album’s most adventurous track first. While most of their recordings from this period were laid down live, the hallucinatory “Planet Telex” was created wholly in the studio. Beginning with what’s rumoured to be a drum loop taken from the ‘Mogadon Version’ of B-side “Killer Cars”, the band multi-tracked layers of tremoloed, distorted guitar, echoing piano and rumbling, syncopated bass. Topped off with an intro of echoing synthetic winds, the result is something like trip-hop covered by Can and produced by Kevin Shields. The title – originally “Planet Xerox”, before they sensibly shied away from a potential lawsuit – isn’t mentioned in Thom Yorke’s lyrics, which instead warn of some nameless foreboding that’s “always near, chasing you home”. Echoing Bob Dylan’s Oh Mercy track, Yorke resigns himself to the thought that “everything is broken/Everyone is broken”, his twisted vocals recorded as he crouched drunk on the studio floor. In both its influences and its studio-based creation, “Planet Telex” would become a blueprint that has remained relevant all the way to last year’s A Moon Shaped Pool.

3 THE BENDS
The Bends, 1995
JAMES DEAN BRADFIELD, MANIC STREET PREACHERS: The Bends is just a supreme rock album – Radiohead fans, even Radiohead, might take umbrage with that, but it’s a testament to what you can do when you write the songs and don’t think about it so much. It’s visceral in parts, it’s tender, it’s got a brilliant post-indie rock’n’roll edge to it. It’s big, but it’s not pompous ever, which is a trick I find very hard to pull off [laughs]. I think they did their best work with John Leckie. We all know Nigel Godrich is a great producer and a sonic alchemist, but I think John Leckie did exactly what Radiohead needed – it was a great partnership. I can hear the interplay between Ed and Jonny, the rhythm section is beautifully understated and brutal at points, and Thom is just singing in such a powerful way. He’s not trying to obscure his emotion at all, it’s just there. If you can get a great title track, a song pivotal to the album, it’s a rare trick, and for me, “The Bends” does that. It’s an anthem that doesn’t want to be an anthem, but it just can’t help it. It’s not over-thought and it just shows what an instinctive, brilliant rock’n’roll band they were. Richey [Edwards] absolutely loved their stuff, and I was tempted to pick “Fake Plastic Trees” on his behalf, because he loved that lyric.

4 STREET SPIRIT (FADE OUT)
The Bends, 1995

DJ SHADOW: I first heard “Street Spirit” when I was at Metropolis Studios in London, working on Unkle’s Psyence Fiction album. James Lavelle, my partner in the project, popped into the break room and showed me Jonathan Glazer’s video for the song, which was a masterpiece. Glazer later went on to direct the first single from our album, “Rabbit In Your Headlights”, which featured Thom Yorke. Aside from it being a great closer, I had a particular experience with “Street Spirit” that cemented my relationship to it. I supported Radiohead on their tour of the UK for OK Computer, and after my sets I would usually join friends in the audience to enjoy their show. In Manchester, Thom did something quite special. He read a letter he had received from the mum of a person who had died shortly after attending one of their shows. She mentioned how much the band had meant to her child – you could tell that Thom was quite affected by it. He then dedicated the final song, “Street Spirit”, to that person. The entire arena was mesmerised, and many were crying. It was an extremely visceral experience, one I’ll never forget. At that time in the mid-’90s, prior to Gorillaz, rock and hip-hop seemed very far apart, other than the odd novelty thing. Rock guys didn’t own MPCs, and hip-hop guys didn’t know how to mic a drum kit. Now, the intermingling is commonplace, but it’s easy to forget that it wasn’t always so. [But] quality is quality, regardless of the genre. The best and purest art transcends cultural and ethnic barriers in ways we can’t always predict.

5 TALK SHOW HOST
“Street Spirit” single, 1996; Romeo + Juliet OST, 1996
EMILY KOKAL, WARPAINT: I got the Romeo + Juliet soundtrack when I was in high school. When “Talk Show Host” came on, I think I discovered a new way of listening to music – that song was just a revelation for me. I felt like I had never really listened to a bassline in music before – I’ve always really loved how Colin plays, he knows how to use space as much as he knows how to use notes. I just sat there and played it so many times, listened to how everything was interacting. My whole musical palette changed, the way I wanted to make music, and the mood of it, especially – all down to trip-hop and Radiohead. I was captivated by the subtlety, allowing for the listener to come to you. If you truly tune into Radiohead, you realise they’re an amazing, high-functioning organism. To hear them expand their soundscapes and move into even less of a rock band format and to keep exploring that, that made being in a band more interesting, hearing a group keep shedding their skin and seemingly do what interested them more than doing anything for the public. I don’t think Warpaint would be the same kind of band if Radiohead didn’t exist.

6 AIRBAG
OK Computer, 1997
The opening track of the band’s (second) magnum opus began life as slightly underwhelming, shuffling anthemic rock, a little like a Pablo Honey album track on the evidence of the bootleg recording from the Bataclan on May 26, 1996. The drums are uninspired, the guitars jangle and the bass is unremarkable. By the time it was released almost exactly a year later on OK Computer, however, it had been transformed into a dynamic, otherwordly piece. A dark, pummelling riff from Jonny Greenwood now introduced the song, backed by sawing Mellotron and distant sleigh bells, before processed drums, inspired by DJ Shadow and sampled and chopped up with an Akai sampler and a Mac, cut in. “Airbag” still feels gloriously disconnected, its phasing, filtered percussion, eerie drones and stuttering guitars echoing Yorke’s fever-dream proclamations of being “born again/In a neon sign scrolling up and down”. The secret behind “Airbag”’s barren beauty is Colin Greenwood’s bass, however: it only appears after 32 seconds, and then merely plays fragmentary phrases. Only in the final 30 seconds does Greenwood play anything close to a normal bassline, which makes the coda, with its wordless vocals and high-pitched electronic squeaks, ecstatically strange.

7 PARANOID ANDROID
OK Computer, 1997

ERIC PULIDO, MIDLAKE: For me, their early stuff probably got mashed up with a lot of other music at the time, but The Bends and OK Computer took things to a whole other level, and as a fan I fell deeper in love with them. I graduated high school at the time OK Computer came out, and I’m sure Radiohead’s lyrical content, and the concept of OK Computer, was fitting for a transition like that – but probably also a bit daunting! “Paranoid Android” has stood the test of time for me in a lot of ways, especially from a musician’s standpoint. Who would come out of the chute with their first single from an album, a six-and-half-minute song that has three or four different sections in it? It’s a beautiful orchestration and story and arrangement. They took the listener to different places within one song, it’s not just verse-chorus-verse. It takes some guts, and it just goes to show you just never know what people are going to embrace and fall in love with. They are the best. Between Midlake’s first two albums, we got a showcase with Capitol Records. We got up there and played songs, and all the Capitol heads came in and sat down on these black couches and watched us play. As we drove back to Texas, we got a call from our manager: “Capitol said they already have one Radiohead, they don’t need another…” We appreciated the reference, at least!

8 EXIT MUSIC (FOR A FILM)
OK Computer, 1997
ALAN SPARHAWK, LOW: There are so many things about this song that I think are really beautiful, but also visceral – there are some really genius things going on here. Writing songs is always kind of a trick – “OK, I’ve got this melody and these chords, and this leads into this thing here, how do I lay this out?” But here, it comes in and it’s so intimate, so close. The chorus section is still quiet, and then you get to second verse and you can feel it coming. Then you get the second chorus and it feels like the peak, complete with Phil Collins “In The Air Tonight” drum fill – it’s the ultimate trick! They come in and it’s the whole band, with fuzz bass, and it’s all the things that fit right in the wheelhouse for me. I think everybody hopes that they can straddle that chasm of band and electronic music in a graceful and interesting way. But there’s very few that can do it. Maybe they inspired Low to change, a little bit. When we did [2007’s] Drums And Guns, there were a few factors going in there: we had just done the dates with them, after Hail To The Thief, and in a vague way that was a bit of an inspiration – how does a band incorporate the front edge of technology and still remain a unit that flows? I guess in various ways everybody’s been trying to figure that out. Radiohead really exude this pure love for making something new, that connects. Playing shows with them – seeing that they were still really in the moment, really trying to make something interesting and visceral and true – to me, that was like, ‘Oh, then I guess it’s OK for me to do that too!’

9 LET DOWN
OK Computer, 1997
MARTIN COURTNEY, REAL ESTATE: I listened to OK Computer again recently, and this song really stuck for me, for some reason. I always liked it, but [laughs] I like it more now! I like songs like that where you’re not sure where the rhythm is – literally every time I listen to this I can never figure out when the drums are going to come in. The guitars are playing in some weird time signature that’s disconnected from the rest of the band, which is kind of genius, because it’s melodic but it’s almost textural, like they took a loop of something and had it running in the background. There’s a magic to it – in most bands, that line would be more straightforward, and it would still be a good song, but the way they did it there’s something very special. It’s almost like the lyrics are secondary to the actual feeling of the song – classic Radiohead with the extremely triumphant and beautiful music mixed with pretty dark, seemingly nihilistic lyrics. It’s a pretty great combo. I became obsessed with OK Computer when it came out – they were a real gateway band for me, along with Beck, into the world of weirder music. It’s music that rewards deeper listening. When Real Estate are gonna make a new record, I will go back to OK Computer to hear the production – because the texure is so rich, but it’s still a guitar record, it’s still rock-band arrangements with a lot of acoustic guitar. I think we took cues from “Let Down”, with those textural, arpeggiated guitars.

10 KARMA POLICE
OK Computer, 1997

On the face of it, the second single from OK Computer had the potential to become a straightforward post-grunge anthem along the lines of “High And Dry”. With its references to karma, and its bed of piano, acoustic guitar and slapback-echoed drums, it also resembles early ’70s Lennon, with the police in question being an in-joke dreamt up by the band on tour. Yorke’s lyrical references are striking – the man who “buzzes like a fridge”, the girl with the “Hitler hairdo”, and the narrator himself who, despite everything, is “still on the payroll”. Its hushed, “Sexy Sadie”-like choruses, sprinkled with spidery piano arpeggios from Jonny Greenwood and a multi-tracked choir of voices, are ominously powerful – “this is what you get when you mess with us,” mutters Yorke through gritted teeth. What could have been a radio-friendly ballad, though, a future echo of Travis or early Coldplay, is turned on its head in the transcendent final two minutes. Yorke’s call of “for a minute there, I lost myself” is simultaneously arch and moving, until the drums and vocals are gradually engulfed by feedbacking echoes, a mocking, pitch-shifted chorus and shattered electronic noise. A tour de force in the unexpectedly emotional.

11 CLIMBING UP THE WALLS
OK Computer, 1997
ISHMAEL BUTLER, SHABAZZ PALACES: I hadn’t heard any Radiohead until 1997, I hadn’t even heard “Creep” – I wasn’t really listening to rock music at all. I was in a car with these people working on a video project, and they were talking about this Radiohead group, really being effusive about it. So I went and got the tape, listened to the whole album top to bottom and I was just blown away. When “Climbing Up The Walls” came on, with the drum intro and that bass sound, it just sounded so murky and dark. It drew me in immediately. When the drums came in with that stuttering snare pattern, I was like, “Yeah, this is cool.” It’s definitely super groovin’, man. I think Philip Selway’s approach to drumming is so rhythmic – it’s so steady that you almost felt like you could flow over a lot of those beats. I think his sense of rhythm and the way that he pounds just appeals to people who like hip-hop. Also, Thom’s cadences, his delivery, even the way he moves and dances, has got a lot of swag to it. It’s groovy and they’re a soulful group. It comes out in the rhythms, and I think that’s why hip-hop people dig it so much. I like “Burn The Witch” too – that shit’s nasty, man! We actually opened up for them on a couple of dates, and I got to see them four times in a row, and it was pretty amazing – now they have two drummers playing in unison, the precision that those cats have is otherworldly. People say, “Ah, they’re the best band in the world”, and it’s kind of true – the amount of time they’ve been together playing, and what magic they can create now through their instincts. They are one of the best bands of all time. On tour, we got the chance to hang out a little bit. In Mexico City, Thom and Nigel were spinning records at this all-night party – they rented out this old church, and they were spinning some sick cuts and shit. It was cool to be in that world.

12 NO SURPRISES
OK Computer, 1997

NORMAN BLAKE, TEENAGE FANCLUB: We toured with Radiohead on the OK Computer tour in the US. When I think of that tour, “No Surprises” is the first song that comes to mind. It’s a beautiful melody, and it reminds me of the intro to “Sunday Morning” by The Velvet Underground. I suppose it’s such a gentle melody, and quite a contrast to what Radiohead were generally playing on that tour, which was much louder and more aggressive, even though lyrically, it’s pretty dark, talking about bringing down the government or whatever. I think they could have played arenas on that tour, but they decided to play 3,000-capacity seaters, so it was great, very intimate. In terms of touring with a band, you never really know what you’re gonna get, whether you’re gonna have any kind of relationship with them while you’re on tour – but we hung out with them quite a bit. They’re lovely guys. They always gave us the full PA, they looked after us really well. Every night after Radiohead had played, Colin would come in with a different bottle: like, “Gentlemen, some sake?”, and we’d all have a little drink. I don’t know if he was bored waiting to play, but Jonny became our lighting guy for that tour. I watched them every night, they just put on such a great performance. For a large part of the tour, Thom was battling some throat problems: so they’d soundcheck and you’d hear him rasping away, and then he’d be belting it out at the gig – he went through the pain, and I’ve got a great amount of respect for him for that.

13 THE TOURIST
OK Computer, 1997
ADRIAN McNALLY, THE UNTHANKS: I think Radiohead could rightfully be described as the most important band of their generation, and maybe since. Radiohead are a band still centred on the rock vernacular, while at the same time being completely musically progressive and taking everything that’s gone before them into account. They constantly try and push things forward – they’re the greatest progressive band, in the literal sense, of the last 30 years. If there is a direct musical influence on me, it’s in the drumming. I think Phil Selway is extremely underrated – the function of rhythm in Radiohead is what protects them from being an overtly four-to-the-floor rock band, in that Phil’s drumming has a sort of hypnotic discipline. He’s not tempted into a flourish, and it gives the whole music a modesty that it might not otherwise have. He should be up there with the greatest drummers of all time. “The Tourist” took a good few listens before it didn’t evoke tears, and occasionally it still does [laughs]. There’s something really spiritual and soulful that’s kind of indefinable. On an objective level, it captures the way that modern life is lived too fast, and it’s wonderful for that reason, but on a musical level, to drum to a piece of music as slow as “The Tourist”, and to give it rhythm and fluidity at that speed, is genius. I arrange for singers who like to do things slowly or in free time, so I’m frequently faced with the challenge of handling rhythm at a very slow pace, and “The Tourist” is something I go back to again and again. But I’ve never managed to replicate it, because it’s too good, too singular.

14 FOLLOW ME AROUND
Meeting People Is Easy, 1998; Kid A Mnesia, 2021
GRANT GEE, MEETING PEOPLE IS EASY DIRECTOR: There’s footage of them playing this start to finish in Meeting People Is Easy, and whenever I’ve seen it I’ve just loved it. It makes me laugh, gives me shivers, a total delight. It was filmed at an afternoon soundcheck in Japan, towards the end of the OK Computer tour. By that point, they would use soundchecks to sketch out brand new songs which, for me as a goofy fan, was thrilling. I remember Thom just starting to play some uncharacteristically bluesy thing I hadn’t heard before, over and over on a fat, black acoustic guitar. So I turned the camera on, and after a bit, he starts to sing a song that sounds like some Buffalo Springfield tune. The rest of the band’s onstage but they’re not even looking at him, just doing their own thing, not playing. Jonny’s sat on the floor doing a crossword or something. As I moved the camera across the stage, one by one the rest of the band started to ease into the track. They may have played the tune before, but right there and then, it felt like they were just finding their way in and making it up as they went along. And suddenly, they all locked in and the whole thing just throttled back and lifted off. Maybe it was just the simple, wonderful sense of them nonchalantly coming together – 1+1+1+1+1 – to make ‘Radiohead’. And, as the track’s flying along, Jonny finally unfolds himself, gunslingers his guitar and starts to dig and scratch and hack high up the neck, and now there’s all this splintered free-jazz squealing attacking the groovy glide which shifts it all to another place entirely… Then the whole thing just stops and Thom says “Right, lunch!” or some such.

15 EVERYTHING IN ITS RIGHT PLACE
Kid A, 2000
JAMES LAVELLE, UNKLE: I remember hearing this on XFM at midnight before Kid A came out. I’d worked with Thom on [UNKLE’s 1998 album] Psyence Fiction and toured with them after OK Computer, but hearing this I realised they’d reinvented the wheel, in many ways more for me than with OK Computer, because I came from electronic music. Occasionally you get records which transcend all musical categories, and “Everything In Its Right Place” was like that. Immediately, we went and remixed the record and played it out. There was a host of other bootleg remixes of it, too, and that album is one that I reference a lot. Their use of the Kaoss pad and how they were messing with vocals and taking it into a different place, it was just one of those moments. I don’t know what they were trying to do when they were making it, but it transcended all genres. And it also signified the beginning of a more understood relationship between electronic music and populist music. It’s happened many times before, whether it’s Vangelis or Kraftwerk or Blondie, but at that time NME-rock and electronic music were very separated. They were also one of the first bands of that generation to engage with remix culture. It’s not just Thom, either: Jonny’s always said really great things about Mo’Wax, and one of their best tracks to me is “Meeting Down The Aisle”, which Ed made, and that’s like a Mo’Wax track.

16 THE NATIONAL ANTHEM
Kid A, 2000

While latter-day Radiohead albums have often featured recordings of long-awaited songs – such as “Nude” on In Rainbows, or “True Love Waits” on A Moon Shaped Pool – recycling old ideas is something that the band have always done. The origins of the most propulsive song on Kid A stretch back to a riff Thom Yorke came up with as a teenager, which the group revisited during B-side sessions in 1997. The fuzz bass and Jaki Liebezeit-like drum groove were then looped, before the band – with Yorke unable or unwilling to write conventional songs for the follow-up to OK Computer – constructed a panoramic landscape of sound on top. Yorke’s vocals are fed through a ring modulator, Jonny Greenwood contributes ghostly ondes martenot lines and manipulated orchestral samples, before a guttural eight-piece horn ensemble thrillingly rip apart the icy mood with free-jazz squawks indebted to Charles Mingus. Live, sans horns and with a faster tempo, “The National Anthem” has been played at the majority of Radiohead shows since, with Jonny feeding a transistor radio through his effects board in a kind of local-radio lucky dip.

17 HOW TO DISAPPEAR COMPLETELY
Kid A, 2000
Although Jonny Greenwood’s second career as a prominent film composer was some years away, he had experimented with Penderecki-style arrangements on “Climbing Up The Walls”, the song ending with 16 violins playing quarter-tones away from each other. On “How To Disappear Completely”, influenced by a self-help mantra given to Yorke by Michael Stipe and a nightmarish dream involving Dublin’s River Liffey filled with mud, Greenwood was given free rein to do whatever he wanted to Yorke’s acoustic basic track. The acoustic guitar and drums are intentionally distant, and even Colin Greenwood’s constantly moving bassline is subsumed beneath the layers of blissfully discordant strings and ondes martenot. Recorded on an Apple computer in three hours at Dorchester Abbey, those woozy strings, provided by The Orchestra Of St John’s Smith Square, lift “How To Disappear Completely” from potentially maudlin and dour to utterly transcendent, especially when their nightmarish, rising swells threaten to completely destroy Yorke’s voice as the end nears. The result was at one time the singer’s favourite ever Radiohead song.

18 IDIOTEQUE
Kid A, 2000
ADE BLACKBURN, CLINIC: We supported Radiohead in 2000 over a couple of stretches, some in Europe in the summer, then we played that Big Top tour in the autumn. “Idioteque” seemed to really mark a turning point for them. It was the song where I thought they’d got an ideal balance between melody and this new rhythmic direction they were going in. It really stuck in my head. It could easily have gone wrong – when you think of a lot of things from the past that have tried more of a rhythmical side, but have just been a mismatch with the melodies or the instrumentation – but they managed to do it in a really tasteful way. A lot of the songs they played then I didn’t know; the setlist featured quite a lot of the new songs, but it was this one that was really quite immediate, but without resorting to an obvious structure. In leaving the guitars behind, they were really ahead of the curve, they did that before a lot of other people. I think Radiohead picked up on our use of the melodica and old keyboards, that’s why they asked us to play. I remember them talking about how just a simple two- or three-note riff is enough if you’re pushing yourself and using different instruments. The impression I got from them is that nothing was off-limits, as far as experimenting with things. They seemed to have a really good approach.

19 PYRAMID SONG
Amnesiac, 2001

JOHN MATTHIAS, VIOLIN AND VIOLA ON THE BENDS: I think this song defined a very big change in what they did. I was lucky enough to have heard some sessions when I visited their studio in Oxfordshire. This was before Kid A and Amnesiac came out. Colin was there with his double bass, this upright piano was wheeled out, it looked a bit second-hand; Thom went to the piano and this amazing song came out. It references Vaughan Williams for me, it sounds incredibly English but ethereal and magical all at the same time. I’ve never worked out what the time signature is – I could sit down and do it, but I’ve always preferred to just let the thing wash over me instead. It’s just beautiful. It was called “Egyptian Song” when they were working on it, and my partner Jane thinks it’s about the solar boat in Egypt [a mythical craft of the sun gods]. The words are fantastic – “I jumped in a river, what did I see?”, what a great first line! It’s straight into the story, and you’re completely immersed. Around that time their studio in Oxfordshire had a tape studio and a digital studio. They were one of the first to work in both spheres, which was very unusual in 2000. I hear the orchestration as a bit like “Serenade To Music” by Vaughan Williams: those two tracks harmonically evoke a pastoral English landscape to me. When I played on “Fake Plastic Trees”, me and the cello player, Caroline Lavelle, played along to just the voice, acoustic guitar and Jonny’s guide organ track which was replaced later on. That was quite unusual – that wasn’t how rock music was made with other bands I’d played sessions on. So their processes even then were the right thing to do for the track as they felt at the time. Even back when I played with Thom in [Exeter university band] Headless Chickens, he was clearly an incredibly talented musician, without a doubt. He picks up an instrument and something special happens, it always has done.

20 YOU AND WHOSE ARMY?
Amnesiac, 2001
Another song subjected to endless experimentation and rearrangements, the loamy “You And Whose Army?” was finally unveiled on Amnesiac as a stately ballad, otherwordly in its archaic feel. First, Yorke sings over mellow jazz chords and Colin Greenwood’s double bass, his vocals fed through the ondes martenot’s Palme diffuseur speaker. Meanwhile, lo-fi backing vocals attempt to channel the subterranean sound of ’30s and ’40s vocal group The Ink Spots with the help of an eggbox over the microphone. “You and whose army?/You and your cronies,” taunts Yorke, addressing the duplicity of Tony Blair’s government. “Come on if you think/ You can take us all on… Holy Roman Empire…” The lyrics are threatening, but the mood is funereal, until Phil Selway’s see-sawing, ride-heavy drums propel the song to a menacing climax, with Thom Yorke’s wraith-like, distorted vocals calling on “ghost horses”. “You And Whose Army?” is a spooked slice of bitter catharsis, its off-kilter structure so successful that the band even ripped it off for “The Daily Mail” a decade later.

21 LIKE SPINNING PLATES
Amnesiac, 2001
ANGUS ANDREW, LIARS: I’ve never spun a plate, but I’m aware of the concept. They’re all on sticks and you’ve gotta keep them balanced and turning otherwise everything comes crashing down. It’s anxiety illustrated. Even though I’d be hard-pressed to decipher what other lyrics are being sung in this song, that one idea, “this just feels like spinning plates”, is so potent that my anxiety shoots through the roof every time. I think it’s a fantastic lyric. The delivery is unique too. Phonetic reversal. Very clever. It’s supposed to be a song they later released called “I Will”, backwards, but I’ve listened to that song and well… Whatever the case, it’s a pretty brave move. Usually when you reverse something in the context of songwriting it gets old pretty quickly. But here, somehow, the music functions precisely in accordance with the anxiety of that titular lyric. The way it lifts through the chorus is really beautiful and essential. Amnesiac was released the same year as Liars’ first album. That’s pretty crazy to me. I remember listening to it on dubbed cassette in our burly old tour van while we crisscrossed the USA. Pretty inspiring for us young ’uns to hear a mega-big band take such exciting creative leaps of faith. Much later we had the opportunity to do some touring with Radiohead. I’ll never forget watching them perform “Like Spinning Plates” in stadiums and thinking, ‘Damn.’ Sure, it’s not their big hit song, but in terms of an art form, for me it sits at the top of their catalogue.

22 THERE THERE
Hail To The Thief, 2003

CHRIS HOPEWELL, “THERE THERE” VIDEO DIRECTOR: My first impressions were that it was quite unlike anything I’d heard from the band before. The track is incredibly atmospheric with a slow build that really draws you in, and this kind of thing is a real gift to a filmmaker. We talked about it having a strong folk tale/fairytale narrative, a cautionary tale with a twist at the end, and the track’s structure was perfect for this. I believe they asked Oliver Postgate first, but he had retired by then, so it was quite an honour to step into his shoes, as he’s my all-time favourite animator/storyteller and a huge influence on my work to this day. His Pogles’ Wood series had big effect on me as a child and was a big inspiration for the video. I had some long talks with Dilly Gent, their video commissioner, about Thom’s ideas for the video and his love of Postgate’s old-style stop-motion animation. The idea of the “dark folk tale” where the character played by Thom comes to a sticky end due to his avarice was distilled from these conversations. Most of it was shot in a studio in Bristol, but we did one day in a nearby woodland, which was great fun. Thom spent the day walking very slowly around the wood and we filmed him. He was marvellous to work with and took the whole process very seriously: the style of shooting we were doing was very slow and quite exhausting, as the subject has to move at 1/3 speed for long periods to get the look we wanted. He performed brilliantly with real patience and was a pleasure to direct. He would have made a damn fine actor in another life. “There There” is still my favourite track and the favourite video that I’ve made.

23 15 STEP
In Rainbows, 2007
ROBERT ZIEGLER, RADIOHEAD & JONNY GREENWOOD CONDUCTOR: I first met Jonny in 2005 when I was conducting the BBC Concert Orchestra in London. He’d written a piece called “Popcorn Superhet Receiver” which we were rehearsing for broadcast on Radio 3. That was heard by the film director Paul Thomas Anderson, who asked if he could use it for his next film, There Will Be Blood. Jonny wrote more music for the film and developed some great new sounds for string orchestra, which we recorded at Abbey Road. Although the film and its score were a great success, we missed out on Oscar glory as any film that uses pre-existing music doesn’t qualify in the original film score category. I knew some of Radiohead’s earlier music and, after the sessions, listened to the latest release, In Rainbows. I was knocked out by the sound, by the fact they asked fans to pay what they wanted, and especially by the opening track, “15 Step” – it really rocked in 5/4 time. At the opening of the song it’s hard to know what the beat is, with just Thom and the drums playing the off-kilter rhythm. Then it becomes infectious and carries you away. Another song I love is “Harry Patch (In Memory Of)”, a tribute to the 111-year old Harry, the last surviving World War I combat soldier, who died shortly after the song was recorded. Jonny wrote the music and Thom sang Harry’s own words which recalled his harrowing experience as a soldier. Thom recorded it live with me conducting a string orchestra in a small abbey in Oxfordshire. I still find it incredibly moving to listen to as a sad, elegiac reflection on war.

24 WEIRD FISHES/ARPEGGI
In Rainbows, 2007

A huge fan favourite, the sublime oceanic drift of this In Rainbows highlight pulls off the neat trick of being beautifully accessible despite its avant-garde adventurousness. As with “Let Down”, the guitars are polyrhythmic, but on “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi”, the textures suggest Terry Riley or Steve Reich, with Ed O’Brien, Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood all playing interlocking, overlapping arpeggios. Meanwhile, Colin Greenwood signifies the slow-moving chord changes over a Phil Selway beat that seems to combine drum’n’bass and motorik. In Rainbows’ lusher textures were more immediate than much of the band’s work, but Radiohead’s seventh album also found the group moving further away from conventional structures; with no definable chorus or verse, “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi” merely dissolves, until Selway’s beat and Ed O’Brien’s shimmering drone take the song to a glorious coda. “I get eaten by the worms/And weird fishes,” murmers Yorke. “I hit the bottom/ Hit the bottom and escape.” Listening to the more ordinary stripped-down version performed by Yorke and Greenwood at a Friends Of The Earth benefit show at London’s Koko a year beforeIn Rainbows’ release demonstrates how crucial the band’s impeccable arrangements are to the power of their songs. With “Weird Fishes”, Radiohead’s painful studio process somehow conjured up perhaps their finest five minutes of all.

25 RECKONER
In Rainbows, 2007
Like “Weird Fishes”, “Reckoner” circles around a blissful, meditative groove, led by Thom Yorke on picked electric and the rest of the band on massed percussion. Originally expanded from just one part of another song, “Feeling Pulled Apart By Horses”, “Reckoner” blossomed into one of the band’s most hypnotic recordings. One of Yorke’s finest vocal performances, his falsetto here is sensual and warm, and there’s none of the lyrical nihilism of his earlier work; instead, he seems to croon sincerely as he dedicates the song to all of humanity. Greenwood’s string arrangements halfway through are sweeping and sweetly melancholic too, with any Penderecki or Messiaen influences kept distinctly harmonious. “Reckoner,” keens Yorke as the song returns to its original feel, the beat and chords reminiscent of Sebastian Tellier’s “La Ritournelle”, “Take me with you/Dedicated to all human beings…” The song bows out on a strangely groovy note, perhaps pointing the way to their next move, The King Of Limbs.

26 VIDEOTAPE
In Rainbows, 2007
SEBASTIAN SZARY, MODESELEKTOR: Compared to other bands, Radiohead have always been evolving and thinking outside the box. They let much more happen to their music than other bands would ever do. A good example are the remixes of The King Of Limbs, which reflect the various interests of the band. I think since OK Computer, it’s been important to the band to break out of the conventional. “Videotape” is based on several piano chords and a series of drum patterns made with drums, drum machines and echo effects that are slowly building up. But they seem like they’re not perfectly in time, which gives a certain irregularity to the beat. It sounds a lot like a timestamp of a moment that you want to backdate. To me, it’s this aesthetic that makes “Videotape” perfect. I don’t think Radiohead have been influential on us, but we’ve always had a pretty good exchange with them, especially Thom and Colin, about plenty of things: music, studio gear, food… pretty normal discussions, actually. Thom came to visit us in our pretty gross studio to record “Shipwreck” and “This” for [2011 album] Monkeytown. We gave a lot of thought to the recording situation… It ended up being pretty improvised, no headphones, the monitors to maximum volume and a very hard compression on his vocals. Took us three takes for each song. Afterwards we had pizza and beer.

27 BLOOM
The King Of Limbs, 2011

YAZZ AHMED, FLUGELHORN ON “BLOOM”: I like the track so much that I was inspired to write an arrangement for my band. What I really like is the complexity of the three interlocking drum parts, the electronic loops and also the long melodies sweeping over the faster rhythms – it’s very hypnotic, very dreamy, you can get lost in it. Recording with Radiohead was top secret. We were asked to go to the studio, and we weren’t allowed to mention this to anyone, where it was, when we recorded. We were greeted by Jonny, who’s very shy and relaxed. He showed me and my partner some stuff – including some Alice Coltrane. I got to meet the rest of the band and everyone was really cool, and we just tried some things out. Then they took what they wanted and mixed it into their piece. We also played on “Codex”. I think we were only in the studio for a couple of hours, it was very loose, very relaxed. I think it was more of an experiment for them, to try out some flugelhorn lines, chopping them up and seeing what worked. On the From The Basement session it was quite different: because it was live we didn’t have so much time, so they were very, very focused, there was no time for messing around. After hearing us play the live version it made me imagine how it could sound with my band. I had to imagine how my musicians play, and I was writing for different instrumentation, bass clarinet, piano and vibraphone, instead of guitar. I can hear all these jazz influences in their music. It’s having that freedom that jazz allows you to have, with a bit of spontaneity.

28 STAIRCASE
Single, 2011

Beginning as a Thom Yorke solo piece picked on electric guitar, this offcut from The King Of Limbs – but as good as much that made the cut – was radically changed when it appeared as a download single paired with “The Daily Mail” in December 2011. Yorke was now playing a Moog Prophet, and Radiohead – complete with Portishead’s Clive Deamer on additional drums – had rarely sounded funkier. With Selway, Deamer and Colin Greenwood playing frenetically, O’Brien and Yorke were free to summon up long, shifting glissando drones, while Jonny Greenwood fingerpicked gorgeous, mellow lead lines over the singer’s disconcerting and unpredictable chords. The groove was new, but the mood – melancholically beautiful – was reassuringly familiar, even to fans of The Bends or OK Computer. “The pot is full with secrets to be told,” promised Yorke, mysteriously.

29 DECKS DARK
A Moon Shaped Pool, 2016
The third track on the band’s ninth album seemed to nod back to “Subterranean Homesick Alien”, the third track on OK Computer, both in its nocturnal, psychedelic mood and its extraterrestrial lyrical concerns. On “Subterranean…”, Yorke wished for alien abduction, but on the sultry “Decks Dark” the image of a gargantuan spaceship, “blocking out the sky”, is a source for despair. “There comes the darkness,” broods Yorke, over sampled and crystallised piano, and Jonny Greenwood’s delicate arpeggios. The song also features one of the band’s most stunning transitions, when the impeccably recorded bass and drums come in after a minute and a half, joined by the spectral London Contemporary Choir. From these sticky beats – perhaps some of the darkest slow funk the band have ever laid down – “Decks Dark” appears to spiral organically outwards, with Jonny Greenwood and Ed O’Brien’s guitars swamped in reverb and almost unbearably claustrophobic as the song drags itself to a close. With hindsight, the fact that “into our darkest hour” could be referring to Yorke’s former partner Rachel Owen’s terminal cancer diagnosis makes this A Moon Shaped Pool highlight even more deeply moving.

30 THE NUMBERS
A Moon Shaped Pool, 2016
While The King Of Limbs foregrounded the group’s interest in electronic music and Afrobeat, A Moon Shaped Pool highlighted their passions for jazz, piano and string arrangements. “The Numbers”, originally titled “Silent Spring”, is a perfect example, beginning with looped and multi-tracked piano clearly inspired by Alice Coltrane’s Journey In Satchidananda, before a folky, bluesy acoustic guitar riff appears. The whole vibe is unhurried and hypnotic, but with strange touches – loops of laughter and conversation, harking back to Bends-era B-side “India Rubber”, lurk in the background. The arrangement sums up the resourcefulness of modern-day Radiohead – the sounds are almost all acoustic, but the track is clearly constructed as artificially and cleverly as The King Of Limbs’ most synth-heavy songs. The London Contemporary Choir turn up again to provide eerie drones, until “The Numbers” flowers into glorious Technicolor with the entry of Jonny Greenwood’s strings, spread luxuriously across the frequencies and clearly paying homage to Jean-Claude Vannier’s superb arrangements for Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire De Melody Nelson. “You may pour us away like soup,” sings Yorke, raging quietly against manipulating establishment figures. “Take back what is ours/One day at a time…” The whole track falls apart into abstract jazz piano and those disconcerting loops, a perfect palate-cleanser for whatever might come next.

This article originally appeared in the August 2017 issue of Uncut