LONDON — Radiohead’s first show in Britain in eight years, at the O2 Arena on Friday evening, turned sour as fans who had spent months fighting a glitch-ridden, anti-tout ticketing system arrived still fuming over canceled orders and four-figure resale prices. The ripple, which has made waves on social media and beyond the perimeter of the concert venue, follows frontman Thom Yorke’s latest reaffirmation that Radiohead will not play Israel again as long as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is in power, fueling scrutiny into who does get access to its comeback run, Nov. 22, 2025.
The O2 slot is in the midst of a 20-date European tour, the first time Radiohead have hit the road since 2018, with four-date residencies in Madrid, Bologna, London, Copenhagen, and Berlin announced by outlets including Radio X and the Swedish news app Omni. Through Nov. 25 at the arena, shows are taking place under a stringent digital-only ticketing process facilitated by AXS and the venue’s app.
To avert touts, the band’s team required fans to pre-register for ‘unlock codes’ and warned that only mobile tickets would be accepted, part of a broader clampdown in response to more than 1,000 suspicious listings on resale sites identified in an investigation by The Guardian. Manager Julie Calland, who argued the system was an effort to get tickets directly in the hands of real fans at prices the band foresaw, even if it was “not a perfect science.
But the safeguards turned into obstacles for many fans. In a comprehensive story for local outlet SE Londoner, buyers reported crashing virtual waiting rooms, errors that revealed their IP addresses, and orders being abruptly cancelled after AXS flagged them as possible bots and locked them out of their accounts.
Frustration overflowed on social media and fan forums, with some calling it the “worst ticket experience” of their lives and grumbling that resale platforms already featured seats they couldn’t buy. London’s Evening Standard reported that fans told the band, “you didn’t stop the bots — you stopped the fans,” as prices on Viagogo rose above £1,700 in coverage of late chaos around ticket sales for the O2 shows.
And despite the confusion, the tour sold out fast, and some buyers lauded the unlock-code system for making it harder to resell tickets in bulk. In interviews with SE Londoner, Calland and others insisted that only about 120 percent of each venue’s capacity was coded to go on sale, and that the bulk of the problems lay in the ticketing infrastructure rather than the bands’ desires.
As the house lights dimmed around 8:30 p.m., they had already played for an hour, deep into the kind of career-spanning set that local listings site Time Out previewed (heavy on fan favorites but changing from night to night), and early reviews were calling one of their most gleeful and hit-heaviest in years.
The London shows come under a different kind of pressure as well. The Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement called on venues and fans to avoid dates of the reunion tour when it was announced, saying that the run would be a “complicit event” that threatened to artwash Israel’s war in Gaza, according to reporting in The Times of Israel.
That backlash effectively resurrects a battle that began with the band’s decision to perform in Tel Aviv in 2017. Among them, dozens of Palestinian organizations and leading artists sang from yet another open letter on the BDS movement’s website protesting Israeli human rights abuses; a campaign further promoted by bodies such as Artists for Palestine UK, which pleaded with the group not to “lend [its] voice and art to oppression.”
Yorke pushed back then, refusing to heed calls for a cultural boycott and calling the pressure deeply disrespectful. In an interview with Rolling Stone reported by the Guardian, he moaned that activists were treating the band as if it were incapable of making its own moral decisions about where to play.
The culture site Vulture, in turn, would later quote a fuming Yorke who launched directly at Waters for singling out the band and reiterating that it will “not be told where we can and cannot play” as well as adding why should anyone even automatically assume playing a rock gig means an endorsement of government anyway.
They’re the kind of arguments that dogged Yorke into his solo work. In 2024, an anti-Palestinian protester repeatedly interrupted a performance in Melbourne to heckle him over “genocide in Gaza”, causing him to briefly leave the stage before returning for an encore of some 20 minutes, closing with “Karma Police,” according to Entertainment Weekly.
This fall, Yorke changed his tune. Citing a Sunday Times interview that covered a number of topics, the Guardian said he had stated that he would “absolutely not” play in Israel again, and he didn’t want to be anywhere near the Netanyahu regime, while adding guitarist Jonny Greenwood’s Israeli family background and affiliations.
The interview also underscored tensions among the band members. Greenwood, who has a long history of collaboration with Israeli musician Dudu Tassa, claims that boycotts force people into “isolation,” while Yorke only recently denounced Netanyahu’s government as “extremist,” even after the BDS movement revived their campaign to boycott the band over the 2017 Tel Aviv date and Greenwood’s ’24 concert in Tel Aviv.
He has more immediate concerts to complete: the four-night O2 stand, followed by a further 20 dates on a European tour. But amid bruised fans who believe they are locked out of a rare opportunity to see Radiohead and activists who say the group has not gone far enough, the band’s triumphant return to arenas is being clouded by some of the most intense scrutiny in its career.
