Thom Yorke needed to move on from OK Computer at once

He tells Harry Styles he begged not to tour the record for two years and calls that break essential, remarks that follow Radiohead’s 2025 reunion dates.

Thom Yorke has said he was already sick of Radiohead’s 1997 album OK Computer by the time it was released and needed to “move on” from it. Speaking in a new interview with Harry Styles, published on 9 October 2026, Yorke explained that the band had already played the songs too much by the time recording finished.

He recalled begging his manager not to tour for two years to promote it, saying: “I can’t, I can’t do it. I need to move on.” Yorke described the “worst thing” about the album’s success as having got fed up of playing the songs before it even hit shelves, adding that “the moving on thing is not a luxury. That’s entirely essential.”

Songs exhausted before release

The comments come amid Radiohead’s recent live activity, including a 2025 reunion tour. OK Computer went five-times platinum in the UK and features the singles ‘Paranoid Android’ and ‘No Surprises’. By Yorke’s account the material had already been worn through in the studio and on earlier stages long before the record reached the shelves, so that the commercial success which followed arrived after the band’s own relationship to the songs had turned.

That gap between the life of the work inside the group and the life it then took on in public is what he returns to as the hardest part of the album’s rise. The five-times platinum certification in the UK and the reach of tracks such as ‘Paranoid Android’ and ‘No Surprises’ sit alongside his memory of pleading for space rather than two more years of promotion. Moving on, he insists, was not an optional extra once the sessions closed; it was the condition for being able to continue at all.

The interview and the years since

The conversation was conducted by Harry Styles. The English singer’s career began in 2010 as part of One Direction, the boy band formed on the British music competition series The X Factor after each of its members had been eliminated from the solo contest. One Direction became one of the best-selling boy bands of all time before the group went on an indefinite hiatus in 2016. Styles has released the solo albums Harry Styles in 2017, Fine Line in 2019, Harry's House in 2022 and Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally. in 2026.

Placing Yorke’s remarks in that exchange keeps the focus on craft: how a band handles the moment when the songs are finished for them while the world is only beginning to hear them. Radiohead’s 2025 reunion tour marked a return to live work after the long stretch that followed the original OK Computer period. In restating that forward motion remains “entirely essential”, Yorke offers a reading of the catalogue that treats the need to leave material behind as a permanent discipline rather than a one-off reaction to a single multi-platinum album.

The record’s place in the band’s story is therefore double. It is the set that went five-times platinum at home and carried singles that still define the era for many listeners, and it is also the set Yorke remembers as already exhausted by the day it appeared. The interview with Styles lets him put both facts in the same frame without softening either.