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pablo honey | the bends | ok computer | kid a | amnesiac | hail to the thief | in rainbows | the king of limbs| a moon shaped pool | current day | notes

I have split up the album 'eras' into a date range that makes sense to me since there are, of course, breaks and lulls between albums.

pablo honey (~1992-1994)

The Internet wasn't really a massive thing in 1993, so I will focus on the next best thing: fanzines and mail!
There was one major fanzine during this time period up to The Bends, it was called Pop is Dead, created by Val Savage. It was named after the 1993 single and had many original additions from the members of the band themselves via interviews, questionnaires, handwritten notes, and other things of the sort. Eventually, fans from around the globe would send in stories, photos, and reviews to be published in the fanzine. People would also put up self advertisements asking for penpals and friends to talk to about the band or music in general. It was mentioned a few times in the W.A.S.T.E. information service newsletters, the band's way of communicating directly with their fans at the time. There were 7 W.A.S.T.E. newsletters sent out during this time. Overall, this era was heavily marked by physical informational sources.

The first W.A.S.T.E. newsletter

the bends (~1994-1996)

Now that it's 1995 in our Radiohead chronology, the Internet is more widespread. It's not well archived for us sad obsessives, but it did exist. Before we get into that, though, I will add that the aforementioned W.A.S.T.E. Information Service newsletters continued to be sent out, these years entailed issues 8-10.
More people learned how to code, a few fansites started to pop up, and Radiohead even had an official website of their own at this time. This website, however, notoriously didn't really have much information at all; fansites had everything you'd expect from the official site! The band's site had a link page where a handful of non-official, but massively important, websites were linked. Sadly, most of these websites are not archived anywhere and are lost to time. One of the only ones that were archived is a website by Tony Bowden called Radiotherapy, which may actually be the first unofficial Radiohead website to exist since it was created in June, 1995. Unfortunately, the Wayback Machine does not have any captures of the website before April, 1997, and a month later, Tony quit working on the website due to work commitments.
This is sadly a very common theme, many websites ceased to be updated after a few years of being up because running a largely followed website took a lot of time and work. As people grew older and gained new responsibilities, it just stopped being feasible to run them.
Tony's website was a big deal if it truly was the first unofficial website. It contained all the usual components of almost every other website that came after it: guitar tabs, lyrics, the band's discography, and articles. It also formed a sort of small community, there was a buying/trading section where people could list their wants and offers concerning the exchange of Radiohead merchandise and a pretty standard guestbook where people left messages talking about shows they went to and compliments for the website. It was nothing too crazy for the time, assuming that it had about the same features in the only capture that exists (1997) as it did in 1995, but it was essentially a prototype for many of the websites to come. At the end of March in 1997, it had 72840 visitors.

Screen capture of the main page of The Bends era website

Screen capture of the main page of Radiotherapy

Links to archives, websites, etc. not already provided above
radiotherapy, as archived on April 16th, 1997

ok computer (~1996-1999)

Around 1997 is when fansites really started to take off and pop up frequently. Radiohead still had their official website, which I'm pretty sure was majorly updated at least three times in this timeframe, once in 1997 and twice in 1999. The main site from 1999 can be found here, though it only lasted for around three months. There was also a temporary website between the two major ones that only lasted a few days. W.A.S.T.E. newsletters continued to be sent out through 1998, but they stopped being sent out roughly in 1998 after the 16th issue. After that, they switched to sending emails. Tony's site shut down this year, but so many others began as well. One that I'd like to briefly touch on is Planet Telex. Although I'm unsure of its exact creation date, I believe it was likely created around 1997 or 1998 and shut down around 2002, designed by Jean-Francois Dufour and maintained by Michael Beam and Max Kolombos. The design of this website is great, I'm very fond of the graphics used throughout. People used to be so creative with web design! Planet Telex featured, as always, the standard parts of any Radiohead fansite. It had sections for the following: discography, lyrics, tabs, other websites, and the occasional list of physical releases.
Moving along, there were two major fansites that both started in 1997. Major. At Ease and Green Plastic Radiohead were probably the two most important sites to exist during the years they were up, they also hosted two of the largest message boards, the At Ease Message Board and Mortigi Tempo. At Ease was created by Adriaan Pels, and Green Plastic was created by Jonathan Percy. It's almost impossible to write about how extensive the impact of these sites was, so I'll attempt to keep it simple. Let's start with Green Plastic. In September of 1999, it merged with another popular site, Injektilo*, which was created by Ed Peers. These two websites combined to make a large source of information for Radiohead fans to look through and learn about the band. It had its own site specials, one of which is about the gear the band use, another is a story written by Zach Proulx about his visit to one of Radiohead's recording studios outside Oxford, and another is a collection of banners used on the site. As for At Ease, it had a very complete discography for the time and a list of books, bootlegs, and more supplementary sorts of things.

Screen capture of the main page of the 1997 website

Screen capture of Planet Telex's main page

There would be screenshots of Green Plastic and At Ease here, but the available archives are unsightly due to broken images and would not be accurate to how they looked at the time.

Links to archives, websites, etc. not already provided above
planet telex, as archived on January 28th, 1999
at ease, as archived on December 1st, 1999 (be prepared for many broken links if you decide to visit this web capture!)
green plastic, as archived on October 5th, 1999 (again, broken links)

kid a (~late 2000-early 2001)

This is a rather short (but still information-heavy) time period in the chronology of websites. Kid A was released in October of 2000, and Amnesiac was released in May of 2001, so this section only really covers less than a year.
Going back to 1998, Stanley Donwood, the artist who has worked with the band since around 1994, wrote the last paragraph of the 16th W.A.S.T.E. newsletter which read,
"There will be a lot of changes to the Radiohead website soon. Very soon. Maybe it will be completely different. I don't know. But you'll see. We've done lots already and we're going to hide in a remote shack on a windswept mountain until www.radiohead.com is ready....Actually, I've just had a thought; it would be good if anyone who does anything interesting (not necessarily Radiohead-related) online could send their URLs to Mel at the usual place. Then she might send them to me. And I could put them on a links page. Which might actually be easy to find. Not too easy though. Anyway, I've got to go and gather dust now. Goodbye. I'm sorry we don't update the website very often. -Stanley XXX"
This excerpt gives a good, if somewhat vague, view of what the direction of the website would go towards.
To start this year off, the updated official website still had a collection of images and links to click through, seemingly endlessly. There have almost always been links to activism websites and websites about causes the band are passionate about, but during this year there were a lot more than before. The web design got a bit more complex, there was a main screen with an image of 35 blood pools (for those unfamiliar with the art of this era, that may sound quite concerning. An image of the front page is below, it is not as graphic as you're likely imagining.) that one could click to get to other sections of the website. Unlike many past websites, the official page in 2000 actually had tour information and helpful parts alongside the usual digital labyrinth. This is in stark contrast to the experimental and withdrawn nature of the album and advertisements this year (for example, there were no music videos for Kid A, and the only promotional material for the release was ‘blips’, which were short clips, sometimes 3D animated, featuring modified bears and odd digital landscapes that aired on music channels), it’s as if the band was trying to provide a resource for fans confused by the cryptic landscape surrounding them. The official website did have a message board of its own, but as time went on, this would prove to be less popular than the unofficial ones. Moving on to fan-made sites, At Ease and Green Plastic still grew in popularity and prevalence. During this time, these websites had their own message boards, but they won't be archived until later on. The most I can go into them is from anecdotal stories I read from people who were there. It seems like no messageboards were surrounded by infamy yet, they all stayed focused in discussion due to the smaller amount of people on the Internet.
A way many websites facilitated conversations between fans was chatrooms, which are sadly not archived either (it seems like nothing is ever archived right now, but only until ~2003), as Adobe Flash no longer works. These started being used in around the mid-90s, but around this time period is when many more people began to get online, therefore more people started going on Radiohead focused chatrooms. Outside of the big two websites, there were still many forums, but a lot of them did not have large populations yet.

Screen capture of the main page of the Kid A era website

Links to archives, websites, etc. not already provided above
official page, archived ~2000
follow me around, as archived May 10th, 2000

amnesiac (~2001-2002)

There are no more updates to the official website in 2001, so I will entirely focus on fanmade sites. Both the At Ease messageboard and Mortigi Tempo were very popular by now, and the excitement surrounding Kid A was still high, but once Amnesiac was released it built even more. To promote Amnesiac, there was an AOL Messenger “buddy” bot called GooglyMinotaur released alongside the album. It was, in part, created by Jonathan Percy of Green Plastic and Beryl Tomay of Follow Me Around (another prevalent fansite created in 1997 when Tomay was just 15 years old).
One website combined the old fanzine culture and the new online environment, it was called Just...Radiohead. This Italian website was seemingly a counterpart to the fanzine of the same name. Another website from the time is Fitter Happier, created by Paul Marshall on February 2nd 2001. This website was inspired by Green Plastic, so much that the site's history section states, "Version 2 began my 'Hi, I think I'm Green Plastic Radiohead' stage. And I'll be honest and admit to it, this version was just basically, very very similar to the site mentioned above." According to Marshall, it took until around Version 4 to get his site away from being too much like Green Plastic. Unfortunately, this is one of the websites that stopped being updated before it could be fully finished, many links that were supposed to be on the front page were never made. This is another website that had excellent graphic design, though I will admit the resemblance to Green Plastic is evident.
One last fansite that was created in these years was Treefingers, which was an English remake of Miro Bzduch’s original 1999 Slovakian website, launched 2002. The site stopped being updated in 2006, with many sections being left unmade like Fitter Happier. Also, it's definitely worth mentioning that fansites were more than just fun pastimes around this time, they were full on news sources. Some, like At Ease, Green Plastic, and Follow Me Around, became so trusted that Radiohead-related news was sent to their webmasters before the press even got ahold of it!

Colin Greenwood holding the first issue of the Just...Radiohead fanzine

Fitter Happier's main page

Links to archives, websites, etc. not already provided above
just...radiohead, as archived on November 26th, 2002.
fitter happier, as last updated February 3rd, 2002
treefingers, as last updated March 28th, 2006

hail to the thief (~2002-2005)

At this point, message boards and fansites were starting to grow heavily and amass huge groups of people. The community had a very excited buzz about it, there was an early version of Hail to the Thief that got leaked early 2003 and many people were talking about the potential new songs and how they will end up on the actual album. A huge part of the culture on At Ease at this time was posting copypasta, pieces of text people would repeat over and over again that were usually a joke specific to those on a forum. This early leak of Hail to the Thief spawned one of the single most iconic copypastas to come out of At Ease: the “here’s what I think” post. According to some users on Et Cetera, this piece of text became a joke because the person who posted it accidentally posted it numerous times, and everyone just repeated it after that. The full piece is below.
“Here's what I think: For a few weeks they've each had CDs of unmastered 'rough' mixes like what was leaked with HTTT and after extensive listening they went back to do the FINAL mixes, adding any cool extra bits that were required (e.g. the cutting up of the drums on Myxomatosis). Now it will be ready for mastering, which takes a couple of days or something. I just hope it's mastered well. Some albums are mastered too loudly and they 'clip' (i.e. distort slightly at loud parts)”
It’s a classic. There were, of course, many more famous quotes from this time, but sadly I will not be talking about them because many tended to be a bit profane. This was the internet, after all. Moving on, due to this increase in site traffic on At Ease and some other factors, it faced frequent shutdowns. One that occurred in early 2004 led current Et Cetera user Blue Oyster Cat, among other At Ease members, to migrate over to a new board, Revolving Doors II (hereafter referred to as RDII). Many of the most frequent posters on RDII were previously involved with the fanfiction thread on At Ease, usually referred to as the Cheesecake thread. Without going into too much detail, the thread's name originated from a piece of writing involving Thom Yorke, Michael Stipe, and a cheesecake. That's all I'll say. Anyway, as silly as it may sound to some people (many people on At Ease vehemently opposed it), writing these stories together, making friends, and talking about life on this thread created a sense of community for the members involved.
Back to RDII. The general population of this board was majorly female, Blue Oyster Cat says there were only about 3 male members. In her own words, the forum was, in short, "whimsical, creative, and very, very fun...Supportive, friendly, intelligent, occasionally obscene (in a good way)." The consensus I've reached is that while the major message boards were fun and exciting to be in at the time, smaller boards like RDII were far more welcoming and approachable to new users. The aforementioned in-jokes on At Ease were funny to the members on there, but to someone new to the forum, it may seem daunting to open up the website and be faced with pages upon pages of text only comprehensible and humorous to those who were around long enough to understand.

Screen capture of the main page of the RDII message board

Screen capture of the main page of the At Ease Messageboard

The official website's main page in 2003

Links to archives, websites, etc. not already provided above
RDII, as archived on August 16th, 2003
at ease messageboard, as archived on December 11th, 2003
official site from ~2004

in rainbows (~2005-2009)

In 2005, Radiohead launched a new blog of sorts called Dead Air Space. This section of their website was used for on-the-road updates from the band, photos, links, and even music recommendations. Coincidentally, Radiohead have just re-launched Dead Air Space on November 4th, 2025 alongside the full post archive. In 2007, Dead Air Space (commonly abbreviated as DAS on messageboards) was used to announce In Rainbows, quite casually, less than two weeks in advance to the release date. The post read, “Hello everyone. Well, the new album is finished, and it's coming out in 10 days; We've called it In Rainbows. Love from us all.”
This album was met with extremely positive critical acclaim, especially due to the unique way it was released. This is a whole other story, but in short, In Rainbows was released with a pay-what-you-want model on their website, a system where people could input whichever sum of money they wanted for the album’s mp3, including zero. This was part of the start of today’s common standard of free music online.
Of course, this new way of distributing the record and the short notice combined sent forum users and webmasters alike into a frenzy. Almost every website that was frequently updated in these years became In Rainbows themed in some capacity; headers, text, layouts, and essentially the whole design for many fansites changed to match the album artwork, while others simply adopted T HI_S WA Y O_F W/R I TI_NG for their titles and custom photos.
I think that about now would be a good time to mention a massive elephant in the room; At Ease and Mortigi Tempo were...very different forums. This issue went beyond just beginner-friendliness, it also involved the general attitudes of the communities and the difference in numbers of users. At Ease is, and was, frequently described as a very negative and unhinged community, and it was much larger. Mortigi Tempo wasn't perfect, but according to those who experienced both forums, the difference was evident. A lot of the forum members who joined in the second half of At Ease's primary years of operation were described as not even really liking Radiohead, and the ones who did were often extremely elitist. There was even a term made up for fans who were not perceived as dedicated to the band compared to other people: "filler fans." While the forum was good for discussing the usual important Radiohead-related topics, it's harmful to completely ignore the toxic side that many users experienced. Mortigi Tempo and At Ease were also sort of rivals, which added to the unsteady environment.
While I'm discussing At Ease more in depth, I'll take a bit to talk about some notable individuals. One of two I'd like to introduce is Ash, a user famous for having an insanely high post count, the highest out of anyone on At Ease. This user also apparently really liked Abu (the monkey from Aladdin). Ash's posts were characterized by a lot of exclamation points and angry emoticons. The second user is weird fishee, a woman who had a sort of obsession with Thom Yorke and theorized that In Rainbows was written about how he's secretly in love with her. She grew to be pretty famous on At Ease; most people who were on there will likely remember exactly who she was if someone asked because, firstly, she posted a lot and secondly, many people made fun of her relentlessly. I have learned a bit about her through what forum users have stated about her, but I won't say anything further out of respect, plus it's not my place to fully discuss weird fishee and her posts since I was not there. Unfortunately, weird fishee ended up passing away, some time before The King of Limbs was released. Rest in peace.

The front page of Green Plastic Radiohead in 2008

At Ease's front page in 2008

Links to archives, websites, etc. not already provided above
at ease, as archived October 11th, 2007
green plastic, as archived October 12th, 2007

the king of limbs (~2009-2012)

Around this time, Green Plastic stopped being updated. In a 2019 post to his previously abandoned website, Jonathan Percy explains, "This site had a good run from 1997 to around 2012/13 when life got a bit too hectic for me. With the rise of social media and sites like Reddit, which foster communities and fans much better than I ever did, it felt like this site no longer served a purpose. So I stopped updating and it’s been sitting frozen ever since." On At Ease, many people either absolutely hated the album, or loved it after hearing a few seconds. Of course, the most vocal participants were the ones who hated it and felt the need to let everyone know about it. After the release had time to sit with people, there was much speculation about an album that was supposedly a part 2 to The King of Limbs. Some evidence people claimed proved the theory was the short length of the album and the lyrics, "if you think this is over then you're wrong," among a lot of other little details that added up to create this theory. A lot of it was for fun and jokes, but nonetheless it was an important aspect of the early 2010s culture of the forum. Around this time is when At Ease started its steep decline, one change to the messageboard was that users had to sign in to view content, which makes archives completely unavailable. I'm also pretty sure it became harder to even make an account once the forum became closed off. Also, Adriaan stopped updating the news in the downtime between the end of The King of Limbs touring and A Moon Shaped Pool's release.

Green Plastic's main page shortly before it ceased to be updated

At Ease's main page in 2011

Links to archives, websites, etc. not already provided above
green plastic's modernized page, the source of Jonathan Percy's quote above
at ease, as archived on February 8th, 2012

a moon shaped pool (~2015-2019)

To promote A Moon Shaped Pool, the band cleared their social media and started to slowly turn their official website white. This, of course, created a lot of eagerness on At Ease and, by now, larger platforms. Some things I found funny that At Ease spawned were countless videos and audios based around LP9/A Moon Shaped Pool speculation and hype (one of my most used words since joining a Radiohead forum. We're all about hype!) which were posted onto YouTube and file sharing websites. Until many years later, this was unfortunately many people’s last taste of the togetherness that came from forums. Sadly, after this is when everything starts to slow down. By the end of around 2018, At Ease stopped being updated and the site faced frequent shutdowns; it was generally unstable. One other way fans started connecting around this time is through Tumblr. It isn't dedicated to Radiohead as a website, but there were many fan communities that thrived there. Although it functions a bit differently from other social media platforms, it has always had its own unique culture around it which seeped into the Radiohead fandom. The platform is, like At Ease was, very joke based. Although the website existed for a long time before A Moon Shaped Pool released, it was extremely active in the mid-2010s. A member of the Et Cetera Forum, amoonshapedtism, stated that they mainly remember a lot of the memes and extreme love of Thom Yorke on Tumblr when they were on the platform from 2016-2019. Meanwhile, Reddit also became an especially popular place for Radiohead fans, including displaced members of forums that shut down, though over time and as less activity came from the band, it sprouted less meaningful discussion and more people posting just for recognition.

At Ease's main page in 2017

Links to archives, websites, etc. not already provided above
a YouTube channel which posted songs about awaiting LP9
at ease, as archived April 25th, 2017

current day

Over the past decade or so, fan communities have shifted immensely from the DIY websites to more commercialized platforms like Reddit and Instagram. Of course, these websites can never replicate what forums had. At Ease’s forum outlived the website itself by around 6 years, but it was a shell of its former self by then. The site was a target for attacks due to its weakened state, and many users completely stopped using it at this point. It was also largely unmoderated, there was only around one active moderator by this point. After the tour announcement in 2025, At Ease came back online with updated news and (incorrect, funnily enough) tour dates. Many past users of the website resign their devotion, they felt a sense of betrayal from Adriaan Pels neglecting to keep the website up in the first place when many offered to pay the cost of servers, and him reinstating the website during this time of heightened excitement just felt like he was taking advantage of the community.
To continue past this, after all, At Ease is not the only important website right now, there has been a new forum created in June, 2025 by Cosmobubbles called Et Cetera, which I have referenced at several points previously. This forum is already steadily growing, although it is still niche. There are about 1,300 members at the time of writing. This community has helped many people (including myself) feel a closer connection to others in the fanbase and foster productive and fun discussions. Many people on Et Cetera are previous members of either the At Ease Message Board, Mortigi Tempo, RDII, and more, and other people are completely new to forums and their climate. I, for one, spend far too much time on this forum, it’s my favorite online space. There are reputable people on there who share insider information about the inner workings of the band; the contributors to the 2025 tour thread figured out that the tour was happening months before it was formally announced. The days I came home from school reading up on all the excitement that happened while I was away have always been the best, it’s such a special place. The funniest coincidences that have continuously happened for the past few months have been Thom Yorke rereleasing his Sonos mixes (essentially, playlists) at the exact time and day people on Et Cetera predicted major announcements would come from Radiohead. This has become an in-joke for the community, alongside saying “today is the day” every day and the phrase “art driven band.” The latter of the two came from the LP10 speculation thread, the story, in short, is that a Twitter account called Has It Leaked made some general statements about Radiohead and their current happenings, although much of it was just common knowledge. One of these was that Radiohead had chosen an art director, which was important because Radiohead are an “art driven band,” which instantly became repeated for pages upon pages. A lot of what goes on in forums can seem very silly, but above all, it has always been fun.

Main page of the Et Cetera Forum

Links to archives, websites, etc. not already provided above
the et cetera forum

an important (to me) sidenote

One thing that has fascinated me throughout my time searching these fansites is the lyrics sections. One thing I have noticed about them is that many websites actually share near-identical notes about songs. For example, up until around Amnesiac-era songs, Green Plastic, Fitter Happier, and Treefingers have almost the exact same notes for the lyric entries. From what I understand, Fitter Happier got its lyrics from Green Plastic and slightly changed the notes, then Treefingers took those altered notes from Fitter Happier. I don't want to jump to conclusions and say this is unethical stealing or anything, but I find it very interesting that these websites shared information like that. It makes sense, it would be very difficult to get and rewrite all the information a good fansite needs on one's own, especially when it already exists elsewhere on reputable websites. Although, one page of Green Plastic contains the following quote, "Please do not take without asking as a lot of effort and time has been put in to this site. You would not believe the sites that copy word-for-word. It is really irritating." Maybe it is unethical stealing, maybe it isn't, but I do feel bad for Percy because I would not want my hard work copied. Just some food for thought!

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