Radiohead 2025 tour has surprise in the works
The Radiohead 2025 tour might see the band perform their unused James Bond theme ‘Spectre’ with a new Paul McCartney type arrangement. Colin Greenwood, the bassist of Radiohead, shared insights about the band’s upcoming European shows during an appearance on The Adam Buxton Podcast. He mentioned that the setlists for these performances will remain flexible. 2025 marks the 30th anniversary of The Bends, but Colin was quick to dismiss the idea of a nostalgia set:
“Oh, I think it’s going to be a mix set. I think we’ve whittled it down to about 70 songs. And me and my brother are not on the setlist committee — we’re too indecisive. So yeah, we’ll play anything in any order, at any time. We sort of take a busking attitude to the Radiohead setlist.”
Radiohead’s new Paul McCartney style version of Spectre
That means material spanning their whole career, and maybe a surprise or two:
“It’s going to be the first time we’ve done shows where we haven’t got new material to play as work in progress. But you never know, some stuff might come up… And I’d love to play, there’s that song, ‘Spectre’. I think I want to play it like a full band thing, you know. A la Paul McCartney, ‘Live and Let Die’, some massive bit in the middle.
Radiohead had released the song they recorded to be the theme for the James Bond movie Spectre in 2016. The band had revealed they were asked to write a signature tune for the movie, but it “didn’t work out” and the song was not used. Sam Smith’s Writing’s On The Wall ended up as the movie’s theme song instead.
Radiohead previously performed a stripped down version of “Spectre” on their most recent tour in 2018, so this would be a completely new version live.
