Radiohead

Radiohead formed in Abingdon, Oxfordshire in 1985, five school friends who would spend the next decade developing a sound that began in grunge and alternative rock and ended somewhere that defied easy categorisation. Thom Yorke's voice — plaintive, urgent, capable of extraordinary range — was the constant around which everything else evolved.

'Pablo Honey' (1993) was a competent debut that gave little indication of what was coming. 'Creep' became a global hit almost by accident — a song the band grew to resent for defining them too narrowly. 'The Bends' (1995) was the correction: a guitar album of extraordinary emotional intensity that established Radiohead as one of the most important bands in Britain. 'Fake Plastic Trees', 'High and Dry', 'Just' — the singles were as good as anything being made.

'OK Computer' (1997) is one of the greatest albums ever made. A meditation on technology, alienation, and the end of the twentieth century, it arrived at exactly the right moment and has never stopped feeling relevant. 'Paranoid Android', 'Karma Police', 'No Surprises' — the songs were simultaneously accessible and deeply strange. It won the Mercury Prize and changed what people thought rock music could do.

The albums that followed — 'Kid A' (2000), 'Amnesiac' (2001), 'Hail to the Thief' (2003), 'In Rainbows' (2007), 'The King of Limbs' (2011), 'A Moon Shaped Pool' (2016) — each represented a significant departure from what came before. Radiohead have never made the same album twice, and they have never made a bad one. That is an almost unparalleled achievement.