Radiohead’s music about alienation makes feeling alienated feel less alienating

1. Culture
2. Music
3. Features

Standing in the crowd at the sold-out reunion tour, long-time Radiohead fan Lucy Jones is reminded once again of what it is that makes this band so special

Get the inside track from Roisin O'Connor with our free weekly music newsletter Now Hear This

Get our free music newsletter Now Hear This

Get our free music newsletter Now Hear This

I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our Privacy notice

Four decades after five boys formed a group at school to play music together, over 20,000 people gather in the O2 Arena on a Friday night to watch them perform, as they have in venues across the world, over the last 40 years. Tickets for this tour sold out in minutes. Millions of records sold. Charts topped with critically acclaimed albums. Adored and followed by fans with an unusual intensity. How, and why?

It’s all laid out on the circular stage in front of me, as they’re playing “in the round” tonight. Phil Selway is in the middle on his drum kit. Ed O’Brien’s on the left. Thom Yorke’s in the centre but wanders around. Jonny Greenwood’s on the right with his many instruments. His brother, Colin, is further back on the right. Chris Vatalaro is also here as the second drummer. Vast screens project graphics of oozing fluorescent slime, glitched octopi, close-ups of each bandmember.

The opening chords of “Planet Telex” emerge – a distorted glitchy wash – and then the glorious drop as Yorke’s vocal comes in and we’re off into interstellar harmonic space. I’ve got that feeling in my stomach: joy, nerves, serotonin, excitement. It’s a feeling that Radiohead have consistently given me, more than any other band, since I first heard “Paranoid Android” on the school bus when I was 11, in 1996, and almost choked on my Nice‘n’Spicy Nik Naks.

I have a good view where I’m standing and can watch Jonny flitting between instruments – ondes Martenot, transistor radio, synths, kick drums, tom drums, glockenspiel, various guitars – playing riffs and hooks that I’ve heard thousands of times. The guitar solo on “Paranoid Android”, probably the greatest song of the 20th century. Selway’s drumsticks are going so fast they’re a blur. I can’t see Colin but I can hear his insanely funky melodic bassline.

On a technical level, the skills of each member are bananas. It looks like they’re having a lot of fun, too, smiling and interacting with the audience, grinning at one another and revelling in their interconnectedness. The atmosphere is electric.

“2+2=5” and “Sit Down. Stand Up (Snakes & Ladders)” follows “Planet Telex”, lurching us from 1995 to 2003’s “Hail to the Thief”, and then we’re into the glorious “Lucky”. The arena fills with their harmonies, each aspect of every song a crucial element in the band’s equilibrium. Layers upon layers of thought and craft and practice, none of which ever feels dialled in.

People often gripe that Radiohead are depressing and miserable, blahbedy blahbedy blah. In fact, they’re uplifting because they acknowledge that we’re standing on the edge, the wolf’s at the door, the government don’t speak for us, it wears us out, for a minute there we lost ourselves, and sometimes we just feel crushed like a bug in the ground, alright? The lyrics endure because they’re cryptic, oblique, dry, but with that core of existential alienation, angst, chaos: WTF, actually, is life?

Well, that’s what it sounds like to me. You will glean your own meanings from Radiohead, or from another band you’ve loved forever. Radiohead’s lyrics spoke to my adolescent confusion and they speak even more to the weirdness and mystery of life as I enter middle age. The music is so rich and engaging, the lyrics so abstract, their songs can hold a life, contain a life, metabolise it. Music about alienation makes feeling alienated feel less alienating.

The aleatoric nature of Radiohead live is one of the best qualities of their shows. You never know exactly what will be altered, what instrument Jonny might pick up, or how the percussion might go. The same goes for the music itself: they’re always subverting expectations. Radiohead often use pivot tones, a core harmonic shape, or chord, from which they meander and experiment and step out of and back to. It’s a bit like the band, and how they go off between albums and shows and do their own things (they last played in the UK eight years ago) and then return to the core. In a way, they’re mirroring how a favourite band becomes a kind of existential pivot point through life’s transitions and changes.

Enjoy unlimited access to 100 million ad-free songs and podcasts with Amazon Music

Sign up now for a 30-day free trial. Terms apply.

ADVERTISEMENT. If you sign up to this service we will earn commission. This revenue helps to fund journalism across The Independent.

Enjoy unlimited access to 100 million ad-free songs and podcasts with Amazon Music

Sign up now for a 30-day free trial. Terms apply.

ADVERTISEMENT. If you sign up to this service we will earn commission. This revenue helps to fund journalism across The Independent.

While I’m watching “Everything In Its Right Place”, I feel relieved. A strange thing happened to me after my first child was born nine years ago: I stopped loving music in the same obsessive way as I always have. It was as though that part of my brain just disappeared or was replaced. I’ve heard this anecdotally happening to others in early motherhood. I wondered if I’d ever get the same buzz from live music again. But this gig is perhaps my favourite of all their shows I’ve seen. My neural pathways are firing just as they did. Phew. I’m back.

The encore is a feast. “You and Whose Army?” is otherworldly, showcasing Thom’s liquid voice. The bonkers time signatures of “Paranoid Android”, its syncopated percussion and bass lines, move our bodies. The final song, “Karma Police”, makes me think back to hearing it for the first time in the bedroom of my friend’s older sister, sitting on the floor, leaning against her bed. Struck.

More about

Join our commenting forum

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies

Most popular

Popular videos

Bulletin

Read next