Kid A2000
- Played
- 18 August 2026
- Side B
- 50 min · 10 tracks
- The room
- 55 seats · Hampstead
A musical meditation on paranoia, premonitions and profound beauty.
If Achtung Baby was the sound of U2 chopping down the Joshua Tree, Kid A was the album that saw Radiohead ripping the wires from OK Computer, setting fire to the motherboard, and throwing the wreckage from a tenth-floor window.
They took the blueprint that had made them the biggest band in the world, and chucked it away. They wanted to dive deeper and deeper into the unknown — and to come up for air in a different world.
I saw Radiohead play their first gig outside London — third on the bill at the Mean Fiddler in Harlesden, twenty uninterested people. They were terrible, by the way.
The biggest mistake you can make is to chase your audience.
Peter Gabriel, to Jonathan Wingate
When we were working on Sgt. Pepper at Abbey Road, a lot of people in the industry were saying The Beatles were finished. And we knew we had this thing up our sleeve.
Paul McCartney, to Jonathan Wingate
It’s the sound of a mainstream rock band dissolving and reshaping into something less defined, almost amorphous. It’s like they invented a new musical language.
No singles. No videos. They did no press — and yet they were just about the only big band that really mattered.
I think Kid A is the sound of a band possibly trying to lose most of their audience.
If you feel safe in the area you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of. And when you don’t feel your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.
David Bowie, to Jonathan Wingate
Once you’ve challenged commercial suicide to a staring contest and lived to tell the tale, you become fearless. And Radiohead were completely fearless.
They got to the top of that mountain — and I don’t think they liked what they saw.
The lyrics read like status updates. They could be Facebook posts, or tweets.
Kid A doesn’t predict the future, but it seems of the future. In a way, it took more than a quarter of a century for the rest of us to catch up with this record.
It is the sound of a fractured future. And it’s beautifully fractured.
This is not background music.
There’s an ageless ache in this music that is ineffably moving and impossible to define. And I think that’s why we’re all gathered here.
There’s a kind of communion — almost a spiritual experience, without being in a church.
Jonathan Wingate, in the room — twenty-five minutes on Kid A before a note of it played. Tuesday 18th August 2026.
One track from Kid A, taken to the piano — explored, interrupted, pulled apart and played back. He had chosen it months earlier and told nobody which; on the night it turned out to be the first one, Everything in Its Right Place. Chad Lelong is a virtuoso jazz pianist and one half of The Seat With The Clearest View, the Bowie record he made with Oliver Darley — the night that sold this room out in June. Fitting, too: the band who made Kid A were listening to Bitches Brew, to Mingus and to Alice Coltrane rather than to rock records, which is where the horns on The National Anthem come from. Chad and Oliver are back in this room through the autumn with SIMPLY — four Friday songbooks, one voice and one piano.
SIMPLY · Oliver Darley & Chad LelongThe band walks off the map and into the ice. Guitars dissolve; something colder and stranger takes their place. The sound of a century turning over.
Ten paintings, one a track — for fifty minutes the screen was the only light in the room. Artwork Stanley Donwood & Dr Tchock.
