Like a jigsaw falling into place, Radiohead have returned at just the right time

Timing is everything. Or maybe it’s context. One feeds the other, like a metaphysical chicken and egg.  As we near the year’s end, timing feels to be winning. 

The one national galvanising moment of 2025 was the return of Oasis. It was a beacon, a moment of rowdy optimism – all those 90s nights when anything seemed possible bubbled back to the surface in an intergenerational mass summer singalong. All was remembered and then, despite the challenges everywhere, all seemed possible.

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Fast forward a few months and Radiohead, one of the other totemic acts of the 90s, are also back together after an indefinite hiatus and playing live to a hungry crowd. Though not on the same scale as Oasis’s globe-covering might, Radiohead’s return is important and vital. 

A band of vision – sometimes a dark vision – their worrisome lyrics about the future could be unsettling, but that future always felt like a slight step beyond.

Not any more.

Radiohead opened their comeback show in Madrid with “Let Down”, a track that features the lines ‘disappointed people/Clinging onto bottles/When it comes, it’s so, so disappointing.’

It feels very winter 2025, on the button, the hangover after Oasis elation, a nation in a twist. Timing and context.

And right on cue, arrives the John Lewis Christmas ad. What used to be a key moment in the changing of the seasons, a propulsive career boost for whoever’s song was featured (though Elton John needed that boost less than others, admittedly) and a moment to draw a gentle emotional breath, is rather less so now.

Blame changing shopping habits, or complex media consumption, or maybe a dose of cynicism that prolonged exposure to social media brings, but it’s no longer a national diary day. 

Read more:

• Oasis songs speak to people in a way other artists only dream of
• Oasis are still connecting and still making history after all these years. Where were you?
• Pulp! Oasis! Robbie Williams! Why it feels like we’re back in 1995

It even seems to have bypassed John Lewis, the “computer science educator, father of four, social liberal, atheist, and not a retail store” who used to spend the time around the ad release explaining to fellow Twitter users that he is a man in Blacksburg, Virginia, not the shop. Maybe he’s just not on Twitter any more. That is also a very 2025 move. The ad mines this year’s recurring tilt at 90s nostalgia. It’s about a father on a memory trip back to a euphoric club night who then tells his teenage son that he definitely wasn’t on a pill then. I’M JOKING. There are no drug references. None. But it is about fathers and sons. 

Despite the slightly clumsy rendering there is a key element at the heart of it, I think – the idea that a parent is a parent because of context and timing. And that beyond that, they are somebody with their own thoughts and agency and fears and ideas and moments of complete incomprehension about the world. Seeing your parent as a person and not just a parent sounds straightforward, but it’s not. If you’re lucky enough to have yours still around and still be close to them, it’s a hugely liberating way to be. It might not always be possible.

The generation in the John Lewis ad, those who were on the Oasis and Radiohead trains first time round, are now becoming an age pulled in two directions – older children with their challenges finding a foothold in the world, and older parents who are moving to the time of needing more care and focus than they once did, or would like. The conflict to see them beyond parent while knowing they need a bit of a hand up is real. And, ultimately, your mother is still going to be your mother and will have a million ways to pull your reins. 

In an ongoing time of flux, context enters. Radiohead, a band of sly wit as well as generational songs, closed their show with “Karma Police”, one of their best-known tracks. Somewhat angry at the state we’re in, a bit tongue in cheek, a little confrontational – there is a recurring line of ‘this is what you get/if you mess with us’ – it finishes with ‘for a minute there/I lost myself’, a sense that ultimately you can find your way back, despite the worst of moments. In the context of 2025, this arrives at the right time.

Paul McNamee is editor of the Big Issue. Read more of his columns here. Follow him on X.

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