On a Friday: The story of Radiohead’s original band name
At the height of OK Computer mania in the summer of 1997, Radiohead were facing a daily deluge of queries from curious journalists from around the world, all desperate to unlock the mysteries of the band they’d once written off as those ‘Creep’ guys.
While Thom Yorke was the most famously disgruntled interviewee of this era, none of his bandmates were particularly bright-eyed and bushy-tailed about dishing insights on the story of the band, either. Guitarist Jonny Greenwood went so far as to claim, in a 1997 interview with the Rocket newspaper in Seattle, that he couldn’t even remember how the band had formed a decade earlier.
“It’s all gone out of my head in a haze of narcotics,” Greenwood said, but in truth, he might have just been mildly embarrassed to admit that, back in the early days of Radiohead, he was more of a hanger-on than a proper member of the group.
When the band first came together in the mid-1980s in the sleepy Oxfordshire town of Abingdon, the core lineup consisted of schoolmates Thom Yorke, Colin Greenwood, Ed O’Brien, and Phil Selway, all students at Abingdon School, whereas Jonny, Colin’s younger brother, was initially on the periphery, sometimes sitting in on rehearsals and occasionally playing the harmonica if he asked nicely, a far cry from the revered guitar wizard and film score composer he’d later become.
The band’s original name, On a Friday, was similarly not quite so clever as what one would come to expect. It was simply a lazy reference to the one day of the week when the members were free to rehearse together, as Abingdon School’s strict academic schedule left little room for extracurricular rock stardom, but Fridays were comparatively relaxed, making them the obvious choice for using the school’s multi-purpose rehearsal space. Like many teenage bands, Thom and his pals likely assumed the name would be temporary, something to get them through the school years before a more inspired moniker presented itself.
The fledgling, “On a Friday” version of Radiohead went into limbo as everyone went off to university in the late ’80s, but against all odds, perhaps, they did reconvene in 1990 and continued refining their sound, building a following in Oxford and writing early versions of songs that would later resurface in more polished forms, including ‘Stop Whispering’ and ‘I Can’t’.
It was only when the prospect of getting a record deal became viable that the guys were forced to finally accept that calling themselves On a Friday wasn’t going to work anymore, for it sounded too casual, too provincial, more like a pub covers band than a group aiming for something bigger. Plus, any rock band with a multi-word name needs a good-looking acronym, and OAF just wasn’t gonna look great on a kick drum.
They eventually found a better idea in an unexpected place, and no, it wasn’t surprising that they’d pull inspiration from one of their favourite bands, Talking Heads, but it was a bit of a left field decision to specifically reference one of David Byrne’s lesser known deep cuts from the True Stories album, which was a Tex-Mex, accordion-driven tune called ‘Radio Head’: “Baby, your mind is a radio / Got a receiver inside my head / Baby, I’m tuned to your wavelength / Let me tell you what it says.”
By the time Radiohead released their debut album Pablo Honey in 1993, the days of On a Friday had faded into obscurity and mostly out of Jonny Greenwood’s mind entirely. And yet, On a Friday remains an oddly perfect footnote to their story: a reminder that one of the most forward-thinking bands of the modern era started out as a group of school kids rehearsing whenever the timetable allowed, playing relatively ‘happy’ songs while they figured things out.
