Thom Yorke Tells Harry Styles the Radiohead Reunion Made Him 'Massively Crash'

By Thom Yorke's own account, Radiohead's reunion tour was really fun in the middle of it. The aftermath was a different story.

Talking with Harry Styles for Rolling Stone's Musicians on Musicians issue, published Oct. 8, Yorke said the run of shows that brought Radiohead back last year left his self-confidence on the floor for months. The comeback, the band's first live shows in seven years, was 20 arena dates across Madrid, Bologna, London, Copenhagen and Berlin in November and December, NME notes.

After the [2025 reunion] Radiohead tour — even though in the middle of it, it was really fun — my response to it afterwards was to crash, like massively crash, in terms of self-confidence. It took me months.… It took me starting on my own record again two months later to go, “Oh, OK. I’m good now. I’m fine.”

Thom Yorke, Rolling Stone

That's an unusually open admission from a frontman who, as Rolling Stone puts it, has been known as a thorny interview subject since Radiohead's early days. It came out of a question from Styles, who presented Yorke's Academy Fellowship at the Ivor Novello Awards in May, about whether Yorke had made peace with being celebrated. He hasn't, quite. “I’d be lying if I didn’t say that something like getting an Ivor Novello fellowship was not deeply confusing for me,” he said. Looking back is the hard part; the next thing is easy. “The moving-forward thing, that’s what I believe in,” he said. “That’s easy to believe in, because it’s new.”

How did Thom Yorke and Harry Styles meet?

On a side street in Rome in summer 2024. Styles had Radiohead's A Moon Shaped Pool in his headphones when he spotted a man in a hat that said “Acid” and realized it was Yorke, who was in town to play with the Smile. Yorke's memory of the greeting is less polite than Styles'. “What the fuck are you doing standing in the street?” he says he asked. Styles went to the show, where they met properly, and he admitted the nerves were real.

You, to me, had always been that person that I was scared of meeting.

Harry Styles, Rolling Stone

The admiration runs both ways now. Yorke went to the first night of Styles' record-breaking 12-night Wembley Stadium residency this summer and, per Rolling Stone, was dancing from the opening song. In the interview he named his favorite part of the show: the stretch where Styles, who says going out dancing shaped Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally, brings that club feeling onto the stage. “That is clearly someone who’s discovering this thing and wants to share it,” Yorke said. “The honesty of it was very cool.”

What else did Yorke reveal?

He'd take one song back. When Styles brought up “High and Dry,” from 1995's The Bends, as an example of a classic guy-with-a-guitar song, Yorke winced. “That particular one I wish I hadn’t,” he said, before adding that there's nothing wrong with that kind of song. NME ran with that line the next day.

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He also passed on the best advice he ever got about fame. On R.E.M.'s 1995 tour, which Radiohead opened, Michael Stipe noticed Yorke hiding in the dressing room, started dragging him out and taught him a trick that, Yorke says, works. “If you don’t care, they don’t care. If you’re not looking, they’re not looking,” Stipe told him. It worked even in a packed club in Stockholm. (NME made that its own story too.)

Then there's the band. Asked about writing with Radiohead versus on his own, Yorke said there hasn't been much of the former lately: “We haven’t been in the studio together for a long time, so I don’t know how it would actually feel now.” He also remembered the comeback's first night in Madrid, when the band walked through the crowd to reach the stage: “I wanted to burst into tears, and we hadn’t even played a note.”

Styles, for his part, had the most relatable confession of the day. His laptop has been dead for about six years, so he writes on his phone with GarageBand and voice notes. Yorke's verdict: “Fuck a duck.” He meant it as a compliment, comparing voice notes to the MiniDisc that used to be his own best friend.

Watch the full conversation below.

Harry Styles & Thom Yorke | Musicians on MusiciansRolling Stone · Watch on YouTube ↗

What's next for Thom Yorke and Radiohead?

A solo record, a play and another lap of arenas. Rolling Stone says the solo album hasn't been officially announced; at the Ivors in May, Yorke said he was making it with producer Sam Petts-Davies and called it “pretty fucking different” for him, according to NME. Hamlet Hail to the Thief, a production of the Shakespeare play built on music from Radiohead's 2003 album, runs at London's Barbican Theatre from Oct. 31 to Jan. 23. And Radiohead return to the road in 2027 with 21 residency shows: four in Perth, six in Melbourne, six in Sydney and five in Saitama, Japan, from May 3 to June 13.