Louder AAA
On May 1, 2004, Radiohead headlined Coachella festival as the final show of their Hail To The Thief world tour. The band's 20-song set was hailed as a triumph - the Los Angeles Times wrote that the quintet's "soaring, post-millennial angst helped set a high standard for festivals to come" - with Coachella co founder Paul Tollett later describing their appearance as a "turning point" in the festival's history.
"Once Radiohead gave you the stamp of approval, you’ve arrived," he told the LA Times in 2019. "Every band started to call at that point."
Everyone was happy it seemed, except for the five members of the Oxford band.
"We needed to stop - properly stop," Thom Yorke recalled two years on in an interview with UK music magazine Mojo. "It all just ended on a really weird note... it had stopped being fun. After that, everybody just disappeared."
"It was definitely time to take a break," drummer Phil Selway said. "There was still a desire amongst us to make music, but also a realisation that other aspects of our lives were being neglected."
Although Thom Yorke used the time out to begin work on his debut solo album, The Eraser, which emerged in 2006, he later admitted that not working with his Radiohead bandmates felt "weird and unhealthy".
"We were still friends," he reflected, "but we'd just had enough of being this 'thing' called Radiohead."
In the summer of 2005, Radiohead were one of the notable absentees from the global Live8 concert, in support of the Make Poverty History campaign, which saw performances from a reunited Pink Floyd, U2, Paul McCartney, Coldplay, Madonna, Kanye West, Linkin Park and Jay-Z, Brian Wilson, Elton John and more.
"We weren't in a good space to stand in front of hundreds of thousands of people and deal with all the internal fallout - we just couldn't do it," Yorke admitted to Mojo. "It was at that exact time when we were deliberating whether to carry on or not. We couldn't even make it in to the rehearsal room. We were just meeting up from time to time and attempting to start work in the studio. But nothing was really happening."
Radiohead's record contract had expired, meaning that there were no boardroom 'suits' pushing a deadline for a new album. They were also working without a producer, in a bid to refresh their modus operandi. But rather than feeling creatively liberated, as bassist Colin Greenwood later acknowledged, the whole band suffered a "crisis of self-confidence".
Such was the mood in the camp that, towards the end of 2001, Yorke posted an updated on his band's Dead Air Space blog page reading, "We're splitting up. It's all shit. We're washed up, finished." A later post read, "I've been fucking tearing my hair out... Furiously writing, working out parts, cracking up. Not much time left. Unsure about everything." Things had got so bad that even the band's manager Brian Message suggested that it might be better if they broke up. "You have to be honest if it's not working," he said. "You have to have passion about what you do."
In the summer of 2006, Radiohead finally bit the bullet and reached out once more to Nigel Godrich, who had produced their previous four albums, in an attempt to become a functioning and productive band once more. It worked.
"Thing came together when Nigel started working with us again," said Colin Greenwood, "because he was someone we knew when we had to be accountable to. Before then it was pie in the sky."
From October to December 2006, the group and their producer took up residence at Tottenham House in Wiltshire, then at Halswell House outside Taunton in Somerset, to thrash out new ideas. When the song Videotape emerged, they finally felt they had a signpost for the road ahead. By the summer of 2007, a new Radiohead album was complete.
At midnight on September 30, 2007, Jonny Greenwood posted a short message on Dead Air Space.
"Hello everyone," he wrote, "Well, the new album is finished, and it's coming out in 10 days. We've called it In Rainbows. Love from us all."
Radiohead were back.
"I didn't think the band would collapse," Ed O'Brien insisted in 2008. "I wasn't scared."
The guitarist took a moment and then added, "You know, if it all collapses, it's only a fucking band."
