What will Radiohead play at the O2? Our data team predicts the setlist

, The Times

Radiohead are a nerd’s dream — or, to use the title of track six from The Bends, a song that they have played three times on their present tour, a nerd’s Nice Dream. We are eight shows into Thom Yorke and co’s reunion jaunt around five European cities and their fans are having the time of their lives. Every night, on their Reddit page, diehards update fellow obsessives with what is being played, the minute that the first note is struck. Music, in this way, has become like following your football team’s score on an app — you are not there, but it feels as if you might be.

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And on Friday Radiohead play London — their first of four gigs at the O2 that will be the Oxford group’s first in more than eight years in Britain. The scramble for tickets left millions disappointed, and what’s bizarre about this band is that even those who turn up might feel like they have missed out. Not because the fivesome are anything but sensational — I saw the opening night in Madrid and the euphoria and absurdly gifted technical playing was in force from start to finish. Yet, unlike other big touring acts, Radiohead have been mixing up their setlists every night, meaning that, essentially, we have no idea what they will play this weekend, and, indeed, it is incredibly likely that they will not play your favourite song.

“Well, we’re contrary bastards,” the guitarist Ed O’Brien told me when I met the band before their tour a couple of months ago. He explained that they have a “setlist committee” consisting of himself, Yorke and the drummer Philip Selway, who decide which songs they will play in the afternoon before the show. “It sounds like a school society, doesn’t it?” Selway says of a committee that the Greenwood brothers, Colin and Jonny, are banned from, owing to their penchant for indecision. On their last tour, Radiohead played Glasgow on an up-for-it Friday and, O’Brien says, adjusted their set accordingly to ditch obscurities and focus on bangers.

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This tour? Well, God love them, they have been mixing it up again. In the eight shows played so far, in Madrid and Bologna, every setlist has included 25 songs with just seven the same each night. So in London you can expect 2+2=5, Everything In Its Right Place, Let Down, Paranoid Android, There There, Weird Fishes and You and Whose Army? Or can you? A few songs have been in all but one show, while crowd favourite Idioteque was centre stage for the first five gigs, but randomly ditched for two nights in Bologna. As the saying goes: “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” Sure, but it’s even harder to predict what Radiohead will play.

Which, by the way, is incredibly rare for big acts. And Radiohead are huge — more monthly Spotify listeners than the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Oasis. Most play it safe — the Oasis tour this year was identical each night, while Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour was 94 per cent the same for each gig and Coldplay’s latest flit around the globe 61 per cent the same. Radiohead? A measly 28 per cent.

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“For one, we have too many songs,” Yorke said. “And two, we’ve always had that attitude of, ‘Let us just drop this one in and see if we fall apart.’” So far, so good — the reviews are ecstatic. But is there anything more Radiohead than the fact that they still have not played their biggest hit, Creep? Or High and Dry, which is their second most played song on UK radio? Or that another genuine hit, Karma Police, is only played every other night?

So, the first night — the Friday. Going by some graphs on the Reddit page, looking for patterns, I would bet that fans will get the seven that turn up each evening, plus Fake Plastic Trees, No Surprises, Karma Police, The National Anthem, Videotape, 15 Step, The Gloaming, Bloom and Daydreaming. But who knows? On night three in Bologna they played Talk Show Host, a B-side from the soundtrack of Romeo + Juliet, for seemingly no other reason than the fact Romeo himself — Leonardo DiCaprio — was in the crowd. Now that’s taking requests.

“Well, I’d love to play Spectre, Ill Wind and Lift,” Colin Greenwood said last month of three rarities, one of which has never really been released. They haven’t turned up yet, but rule nothing out. And if they do, the boffins will go into overdrive, patterns will be destroyed, the spreadsheets broken. For diehards, this band are like a full-time job, but is that obsession not the best way to enjoy music?
Radiohead play the O2 Arena, London, Nov 21, 22, 24, 25