“We did some rehearsals about two months ago in London... And it was really fun, we had a really good time”: Colin Greenwood reveals that Radiohead are playing together again

Good news for Radiohead fans – the band have been rehearsing together, according to bassist Colin Greenwood, anyway.

Greenwood spilled the beans at a virtual event for Hay Festival Queretaro on Sunday. He was talking about his upcoming photography book How To Disappear: A Photographic Portrait of Radiohead and revealed that the band met up a couple of months back.

“We did some rehearsals about two months ago in London, just to play the old songs,” he said when the conversation turned to the band. “And it was really fun, we had a really good time.”

The news will come as some relief to fans, who may have been despairing about band ever re-constituting itself. Radiohead’s last album A Moon Shaped Pool came out in 2016 and since they finished touring that record in 2018 there has been no suggestion that any new music from the band would be forthcoming any time soon.

Since then Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood have been busy with The Smile, their project with Sons Of Kemet drummer Tom Skinner – they release a third album Cutouts next month. 

Ed O’Brien has another solo record coming out and aside from his photography Colin Greenwood himself is currently playing bass with Nick Cave.

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Earlier in the year Jonny Greenwood confirmed that the band were still in regular contact. “We’re still talking all the time, we just need to make a plan and get some time together sorted out in advance,” the guitarist said in an interview with the Guardian. “I’ve never been very good at that. Too busy dicking around in this studio.”

In contrast to the ongoing fraternal psychodrama that is their 90s contemporaries Oasis, Radiohead seem to approach being in a band in their 50s in distinctly grown-up, dare we say, middle-class manner. 

In a 2020 interview with NME, Ed O’Brien revealed how things work on Planet Radiohead: “We’re an ongoing band and have online meetings – there was a Zoom call recently. We’re talking about stuff, but for the foreseeable future everyone is doing their own thing. 

"When it feels right to plug back into Radiohead, then we will.”

And by the sounds of it, that time is coming soon.

Colin Greenwood’s book How To Disappear: A Photographic Portrait Of Radiohead comes out on October 15