The tour itself was a blast—but once it ended, everything fell apart. In a rare conversation with Harry Styles for Rolling Stone, Thom Yorke opened up about the low point he hit after Radiohead's reunion tour wrapped last year.
Radiohead announced their return to live performance last September after more than seven years away, playing 20 arena shows across Madrid, Bologna, London, Copenhagen, and Berlin that November and December. Yorke described the tour itself as "really fun"—but things took a sharp turn once it was over.
"After the Radiohead tour—even though it was really fun to do—my response was to just fall apart, my confidence massively crashed," Yorke said. "It took me months. It wasn't until two months later, when I got back into making my own album, that I finally felt like, okay, I'm alright. I'm good." He added that he has "a very strange relationship" with that chapter of his past, and that he's grown used to feeling that way.
The conversation started when Styles asked whether Yorke has become more willing to embrace and celebrate his own past work—whether through the Radiohead tour or accepting the Academy Fellowship at the 2026 Ivor Novello Awards. Yorke's answer was blunt: "I have to admit, receiving the Ivor Novello Fellowship was deeply confusing for me. I have so much respect for the people who've won it—some of them are literally my heroes. But I have a very, very strange relationship with that side of my own work."
Rather than looking back, Yorke said it's much easier for him to believe in moving forward: "That's easy to believe in, because it's new. I don't have to explain it, so I feel at ease with it."
He also tied that unease to his experience at the Ivor Novello Awards ceremony, where Styles himself presented him with the Fellowship, calling Radiohead his "favorite band" and sharing a memorably personal confession—that he lost his virginity to "Talk Show Host." Yorke said of it: "That Ivors thing—honestly, your speech was great, because it was honest and personal, and I could relate to it. But when things start to feel like a business, and you're part of that business, and the cameras are rolling... I don't know, man, I get this legacy feeling, like I'm being frozen into some kind of monument."
Despite how hard the post-tour crash hit, Yorke also looked back on how moving the whole reunion process had been. He recalled the opening night in Madrid, walking through the crowd toward the stage: "We were all just thinking, 'Okay, hold it together, hold it together.' Because I genuinely wanted to cry right there, and we hadn't even played a note yet. I hadn't been surrounded by that feeling in so long, and that moment of walking through the middle of the crowd... I mean, all of us were just thinking, 'Oh my god, oh my god.'"
That echoes what Yorke said earlier this year at the Ivor Novello Awards, where he called the tour "overwhelming" but added, "I'm really, really glad we did it." He also revealed he's currently working on a new solo album with producer Sam Petts-Davies, describing its sound as "pretty fucking different" for him.
As for Radiohead itself, the band has yet to return to the studio together. Yorke told Styles: "We're not collaborating. We haven't been in the studio together in a really long time, so I don't actually know what that would feel like right now." Still, their live reunion isn't over yet—the band has already announced 21 shows across Australia and Japan in 2027.
