How Chico Buarque named the band Radiohead

in the song “The Last Blues” in Chico Buarque, released in 1985, the character in the lyrics sees a woman dancing the blues in her bedroom. Because it’s imagination, buarque says on the track that the scene takes place in your “Head radio.” At the time, the lead singer David Byrne, from the band Talking Heads, heard the song and loved the expression. The following year, she wrote the song “Radio Head” from disk True Story (1986).

Years later, in 1991 in England, a band called “On a Friday”, started to be successful. After the members met with the label’s representative and signed a six-disc deal, they were asked to change the group’s name. The band was renamed radioheadinspired by the song title of the talking heads. And so there is an indirect influence of the Brazilian singer with the British band.

The story was told by himself Chico Buarque in an interview with Rolling Stone Brazil in 2011. When asked about Brazilian music abroad, boy claims that its international influence exists in another form. The statement told in an interview came from a football match in Lisbon, where Phil Selway, drummer of radiohead, I was present.

selway stayed on the bench and Chico Buarque he said, “Listen, don’t just stand there and frown because your band name is stolen from a song of mine.”

The singer also explains: “The David Byrne [Talking Heads] heard the ‘head radio’ which contains the verse ‘on Radio Head’when the disc was released Trickster’s Opera(1985). He was here and sang ‘The Return of the Trickster’ in the Canecão. He must have thought it was an expression that was used a lot in Brazil and made the music there ‘Radio Head’, by True Stories (1986), that gave rise to radiohead.”

Radiohead changes its name

Since the eighth album, The Moon Shaped Pool(2016) the band went on hiatus and there was no new work. Only during the quarantine of the Covid-19 pandemic, in 2020. The members gathered to make some live performances broadcast by YouTube.

In May of this year, Tom Skinner (drummer), Thom Yorke (vocalist) and greenwood (guitarist) formed the The Smile and released the disc A Light for Attracting Attention (2022) as a side project. The album brings a vigorous, violent rock, which for a long time has not left the universe of radiohead.