The band, whose members met while attending Abingdon School, a public all-boys school, is made up of Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood, Ed O’Brien, Colin Greenwood and Phil Selway. The name Radiohead is taken from a Talking Heads song.
In 1992 Radiohead released a debut EP called “Drill,” with little success. The band then hired producers Paul Kolderie and Sean Slade, who previously worked with Pixies and Dinosaur Jr. The result of this collaboration was the band’s first album, “Pablo Honey.” The album did not get good reviews from music magazines or much radio-play. After the first single “Creep” gained moderate success due largely to heavy rotation of MTV, the band was hastily labeled a one-hit wonder.
After a lengthy tour Radiohead produced their second album, The Bends. Sales of The Bends were disappointing but music critics from music magazines and discount magazines like Rolling Stones, Spin and NME began to take more notice.
In 1997 Radiohead released OK Computer, which became a huge hit. The album topped many music magazines’ “best of” polls and the band won the “Best Alternative Music” Grammy Award. Billboard magazine gushed, “OK Computer is the album that establishes Radiohead as one of the most inventive and rewarding guitar rock bands of the '90s.”
Radiohead followed up their massively successful album with 2000’s “Kid A.” Rolling Stone magazine commented that the album was wildly different from other Radiohead outings, “It is a kind of virtual rock in which the roots have been cut away, and the formal language -- hook, riff, bridge -- has been warped, liquefied and, in some songs, thrown out altogether. While the album garnered mostly positive feedback, including another Best Alternative Music Grammy, the band did not release any singles or tour very much. A few months later Radiohead released a live recordings album from its European tour.
In 2003 the band returned to the studio and released Hail to the Thief. The album reached number three on the charts in Billboard magazine and marked the band’s contract completion with EMI. Rolling Stone magazine said of the album, “Despite the anger and bitterness, Hail to the Thief is more musically inviting than Radiohead's last two outings.”
With their independence from EMI, the band initially rejected Apple Inc.'s iTunes because of the powerful online music store's "unbundling" policy — selling individual songs separately from the albums. In 2007, the band announced it would digitally sell its music exclusively through the U.K.-based online music store 7digital, which allows for bundling. In the meantime, Thom Yorke quietly issued his first solo album, a characteristically dark, electronics-based outing called The Eraser that got mixed reviews.
Then in October 2007, Radiohead made a music-history-making announcement: not only were they ready to release a new album called “In Rainbows”, but they would sell it on the Radiohead Website only, and fans could choose to pay whatever price they wanted for it, including nothing.
According to Rolling Stone magazine, the Internet data analysts comScore reported 38 percent of people who downloaded the album were willing to pay an average of $6 for the album; 62 percent chose to pay nothing for it. Later Radiohead’s catalogue was made available on iTunes in June 2008 to correspond with the release of a greatest hits album. Cheap magazines like Entertainment Weekly touted the album as “The British rock gods bypassed the system entirely with this direct-to-the-people masterpiece, the culmination of everything weird and wonderful about their sound.”
