If you haven’t watched Anyone Can Play Guitar, the 2011 documentary on the Oxford music scene, there’s a good chance you’ve never seen the photo above, which captures four out of five members of Radiohead in the mid-’80s, back when the band was called On a Friday. Thom Yorke looks like a Culkin kid. Phil Selway has a full head of hair. Ed O’Brien could blend in at Bayside High. Colin Greenwood exemplifies general gangliness.
Plus, there are the Iron Maiden posters.
At the time, Jonny Greenwood was playing in a group called Illiterate Hands with a schoolmate named Nigel Powell. As Buzzfeed points out, the bedroom of the latter was the makeshift studio for the awkward band shot (are they holding invisible beers?) — they also recorded their first demos there. Their live lineup at the time included three saxophones, apparently. O’Brien, Colin Greenwood, and ‘Head manager Chris Hufford all speak on this mottled past for the film.
Anyone Can Play Guitar, of course, takes its name from the band’s 1993 single of the same name. Other bands featured in the doc include Supergrass, Ride, Swervedriver, Foals, Talulah Gosh, and the Candyskins. Director Jon Spira promises to use “the unheard stories of some of the greatest bands and the greatest stories of some of the unheard bands as the backdrop to a truly unique and epic saga of success, failure, good intentions and bad outcomes.”
