We have too many songs

Radiohead have revealed they will play in the round at their upcoming shows and have speculated on what will make up the setlists.

The band are preparing to play their first shows in over seven years, with four nights each in Madrid, Bologna, London, Copenhagen and Berlin to take place between November 4 and December 12.

In a new interview with The Times, the band have revealed that the shows will all be played in the round – with the audience surrounding the stage on all sides. It marks a departure from Radiohead’s typical setup, although as drummer Philip Selway noted in the interview, “we’ve actually done it once before,” referring to a 1993 Canadian tour when they opened for Ned’s Atomic Dustbin.

Inevitably, Radiohead fans have also been speculating about the makeup of the setlists for the upcoming shows, and the band confirmed that they have whittled their options down to a shortlist of approximately 65 tracks, which Jonny Greenwood said they were “all frantically learning”.

Thom Yorke, Ed O’Brien and Selway serve as the band’s “setlist committee”, deciding on the setlist just hours before the start of every show, and they assured fans that the setlists will change from date to date. “We have too many songs,” Yorke said.

“We’re contrary bastards,” O’Brien added.

When asked what songs would be a lock for the shows, Yorke quipped: “There are no surprises”.

The comments follow on from bassist Colin Greenwood telling The Adam Buxton Podcast in September: “Oh, I think it’s going to be a mix set. I think we’ve like whittled it down to about 70 songs. And me and my brother [guitarist Jonny Greenwood] are not on the setlist committee, we’re not allowed, because we’re too indecisive.”

“So we’ll play anything in any order, at any time. We sort of take a busking attitude to the Radiohead setlist,” he added. “It’s going to be the first time I think we’ve done shows where we haven’t got new material to play as work in progress. But you never know, some stuff might come up or not or whatever, so.”

They will be the first Radiohead shows since the end of their ‘A Moon Shaped Pool’ world tour in 2018, with the 77th and final show having gone down in Philadelphia’s Wells Fargo Center in August of that year. The band have also not released any new music since the album of the same name, released in 2016.

In the new interview, they also shed light on why it has taken so long for the band to play together again. “I guess the wheels came off a bit, so we had to stop,” Thom Yorke explained. “There were a lot of elements. The shows felt great but it was, like, let’s halt now before we walk off this cliff.”

He also shared that he needed the time away from the spotlight because he had not given himself time to grieve the loss of his first wife Dr. Rachel Owen, who died in December 2016 from cancer at the age of 48. “[My grief] was coming out in ways that made me think, I need to take this away,” he explained.

Elsewhere in the new interview, the band members each reflected on the controversies stemming from their stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict, with Yorke saying the “low-level Arthur Miller witch-hunt” on the subject “wakes him up at night”.

The band were criticised for playing a show in Tel Aviv in 2017, Yorke got into a clash with a protester at a solo show in Melbourne in 2024 and Jonny Greenwood has been attacked for collaborating with and playing live with Israeli musician Dudu Tassa.

Yorke said he would “absolutely not” play in Israel with the band again, but Greenwood “politely disagreed” with him, calling the backlash “the embodiment of the left”, adding: “The left look for traitors, the right for converts and it’s depressing that we are the closest they can get”.

The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, meanwhile, have argued that the band’s “complicit silence” and support of Israeli performers during the “genocide against Palestinians in Gaza” should lead to a boycott of their upcoming shows.