Radiohead reading list: Books read and recommended by the band
The members of Radiohead first coagulated in the music room at Abingdon School in Oxfordshire. The geeky misfits found a shared passion for music as they sought refuge from belligerent teachers and fellow students. Over time, they discovered the chemistry that would rack nine innovative studio albums and a barrage of acclaim as one of the greatest rock bands since the 1960s.
Abingdon School has been depicted as having a Dickensian atmosphere by members of Radiohead and the comedian David Mitchell, who had also attended the school a year after the rock group had left. This oppressive Victorian environment may not have been conducive to laughter and tomfoolery, but literary immersion was no doubt encouraged.
From their very first album, Pablo Honey, Thom Yorke found inspiration in cultural figures and absorbed much of the fuel for his genius from iconic writers. When grappling with writer’s block in the run-up to 2000’s Kid A, for example, Yorke turned to the progressive “cut-up” technique as championed by the late Beat Generation writer William S. Burroughs.
Across their illustrious oeuvre, Yorke has employed a wealth of literary references to add depth to his lyrics. Whether it’s Douglas Adams’ affable paranoid android in OK Computer, Dante’s fearsome hellscapes in ‘Pyramid Song’ or George Orwell’s political satire in ‘Optimistic’, Radiohead have shown a knack for spinning silent reading into sonic gold.
In 2016, Yorke donated a copy of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence to an Oxfam charity shop. A staff member priced the book at 50p and put it out on display. However, another member of staff later picked up the book to discover that the Radiohead songwriter had made a series of annotations and notes around some of the poems and on one of the blank pages, he had written an early draft of ‘Airbag’, the first track on OK Computer.
The staff swiftly peeled off the 50p sticker and put the book up for auction, where it sold for a whopping £12,000. This, I feel, brings a more literal meaning to my previous “spinning into gold” comment.
Today, I’ve compiled a Radiohead reading list for my fellow fans of both the band and reading recommendations. For some of the entries, I had to employ the full force of my investigative skills to find hidden links within songs and albums. Thankfully, some lower-hanging fruit was found in direct recommendations from the band members across various interviews and tweets.
For instance, Jonny Greenwood’s two recommendations appeared in his 2019 ‘My Culture Fix’ feature with The Times and Ed O’Brien’s appeared in a 2020 feature with the NME. Meanwhile, Yorke and Colin Greenwood gave their recommendations on BBC Radio 4 in 2019, the former as part of his Desert Island Discs appearance, and the latter, during his visit to Harriett Gilbert’s ‘A Good Read’ segment.
The Radiohead reading list:
- Dante – The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso
- William Blake – Songs of Innocence
- Douglas Adams – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series
- George Orwell – Animal Farm
- Rachel Carson – Silent Spring
- Naomi Klein – No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs
- 14th Dalai Lama – The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
- Evelyn Waugh – The Sword of Honour trilogy (Jonny Greenwood)
- Stefan Zweig – Beware of Pity (Jonny Greenwood)
- Primo Levi – ‘If This Is a Man’
- Julie Rogers – The Sound of Being Human (Philip Selway)
- Henry David Thoreau – Walden (Ed O’Brien)
- Jay Griffiths – Wild (Ed O’Brien)
- Jon Day – Homing (Colin Greenwood)
- Colm Tóibín – Bad Blood: A Walk Along the Irish Border (Colin Greenwood)
- Shunryū Suzuki – Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (Thom Yorke)
