Radiohead

Radiohead is the most important alternative rock band of the last three decades. Formed in Oxford in 1985, Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood, Colin Greenwood, Ed O'Brien and Phil Selway crafted a sound that began in post-Britpop guitar rock and expanded into electronic, orchestral and experimental territory that no band had occupied before them.

OK Computer (1997) was the first album to capture the paranoia and disorientation of the digital age; it is regularly voted the greatest album ever made. Kid A (2000) abandoned guitars almost entirely in favour of Ondes Martenot, glitchy electronics and jazz-inflected rhythms, baffling critics before being recognised as a decade-defining masterpiece. In Rainbows (2007) was released pay-what-you-want, a radical act that prefigured the streaming economy.

Jonny Greenwood's parallel career as a film composer for Paul Thomas Anderson has introduced the band's music to new audiences. Their influence on rock, electronic music and experimental pop is incalculable.