Radiohead's Rehearsal Room — Abingdon School Music Block

Radiohead trace their origins to the music room of Abingdon School, an independent boys' school on Park Road in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, where five future members of the band met as pupils in the early 1980s. In 1985, Thom Yorke, Colin Greenwood, Ed O'Brien, and Philip Selway formed a group they called On a Friday — the name a straightforward reference to the only day of the school week when the music room was made available to them. Their earliest recordings were made in what the school archives describe as Music Studio One, a large room on the first floor of the Ingham Music School, identifiable from outside by its distinctive lead-clad dormer windows. Colin's younger brother Jonny, several years below the others, would join later.

The band spent years rehearsing and recording demos in and around Abingdon before being signed to EMI, who required them to change their name from On a Friday to Radiohead in 1991. The schoolboy sessions were formative in an unusual sense: unlike many bands who jell quickly and then dissolve, On a Friday remained together through university terms and beyond, reconvening to rehearse every time holidays allowed. That slow-burn patience arguably contributed to the remarkable cohesion and longevity that characterises Radiohead's subsequent career.

Abingdon School continues to operate as a private institution and has quietly acknowledged its most famous alumni in its archives. It is not open to the public as a tourist attraction. For Radiohead fans, however, the town of Abingdon — and the music block in particular — represents the first chapter of one of the most critically celebrated careers in rock history: the point where a group of Oxfordshire schoolboys began, on Friday afternoons, to figure out what they were.