At 9.38 on Tuesday morning, a Perth music fan sat in a Ticketek queue at number 25,000 with 4,500 people still ahead of them, and did what you do in that situation: went online to find out whether anyone else was suffering.

They were. The thread that followed drew 149 replies in a few hours and turned into a kind of collective nervous breakdown, conducted in queue numbers. People who had registered weeks ago. People who thought they'd lost their place the moment the gates opened. People refreshing on three devices.

The occasion: Radiohead are playing Perth for the first time since February 1998.

The Perth shows

Radiohead play RAC Arena on Monday 3, Tuesday 4, Thursday 6 and Friday 7 May 2027.

Four nights. And not four nights tacked onto the end of a national run, either — these are the first four shows of the entire tour. The band opens in Perth and works east.

If you have spent any time in this city watching international tours announce Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and then stop, you will understand why that detail has been passed around as much as the dates themselves.

The full tour

Sixteen Australian shows across three cities between 3 May and 1 June 2027:

• Perth — RAC Arena: 3, 4, 6, 7 May
• Melbourne — Rod Laver Arena: 13, 14, 16, 17, 19, 20 May
• Sydney — Afterpay Arena, Sydney Olympic Park: 25, 26, 28, 29, 31 May and 1 June

The band then moves to Japan on 8 June for five nights at the GMO Arena in Saitama, just north of Tokyo — 21 dates in total.

Two things about that itinerary are worth sitting with. It is Radiohead's first Australian tour in 15 years, their last being in 2012. And these will be the band's only concerts anywhere in the world in 2027. There is no European leg to catch instead, no American run to fly to. If you want to see Radiohead next year, you come to one of three Australian cities or you go to Saitama.

The venue they last played no longer exists

Radiohead's previous Perth show was on 10 February 1998, at the Perth Entertainment Centre, on the OK Computer tour, supported by the Sydney band Big Heavy Stuff.

That building closed in 2002 and was demolished in 2011. Its replacement, the arena on Wellington Street now known as RAC Arena, opened the following year. So a fan who saw them in 1998 and sees them in 2027 will have watched the same band in two different buildings, twenty-nine years apart, the first of which no longer stands.

Perth was a very different city in 1998, and Radiohead were a very different band — three albums in, still six months from the tour documentary Meeting People Is Easy that captured how much the whole experience was costing them.

Who Radiohead are, for anyone standing at the edge of this

Five men from Abingdon, Oxfordshire, who met at school and formed a band in 1985 called On a Friday, because Friday was when they could book the music room. They became Radiohead in 1992, taking the name from a Talking Heads song.

The lineup has never changed: Thom Yorke on vocals, Jonny Greenwood on lead guitar and everything else, Colin Greenwood on bass, Ed O'Brien on guitar, Philip Selway on drums. Nine studio albums across twenty-three years, and no two of them quite the same band.

• Pablo Honey (1993) — contains "Creep", the song that made them famous and that they spent the next decade trying to escape.
• The Bends (1995) — the one that proved they were not a novelty.
• OK Computer (1997) — routinely named among the best albums ever made, and the record they were touring when they last came to Perth.
• Kid A (2000) and Amnesiac (2001) — the hard left turn into electronics that lost some people and converted far more.
• Hail to the Thief (2003).
• In Rainbows (2007) — released as a pay-what-you-want download, a decision that rearranged the music industry's assumptions overnight.
• The King of Limbs (2011).
• A Moon Shaped Pool (2016) — their most recent album, now a decade old.

They stopped touring in 2018 and did not play a show for seven years. The 2025 European run was the return, and the reviews of it are the reason the Australian announcement was met the way it was: the live show is reportedly as good as it has ever been, and Jonny Greenwood's years scoring films have fed back into the arrangements.

How the tickets worked

The tour was announced on 7 September. Rather than a straight on-sale, the band ran a registration process, then issued registered fans a unique code for a "Chance to Purchase" window that opened at 9am AWST on Tuesday 15 September and ran through to Thursday 17 September.

That is the queue Perth spent Tuesday morning in. Registration has now closed. Ticketek is the only authorised seller — tickets are available online, by phone on 13 28 49, or through agencies. Prices were not published on the venue listing.

The usual warning applies with more force than usual here. A band playing three Australian cities once in fifteen years produces exactly the conditions resale operators live for. Tickets bought outside the authorised channel may not get you in.

Practical things for the night

• Bags larger than A4 are not permitted at RAC Arena.
• Parking at the venue is a $30 flat rate on event nights — though the arena is a short walk from Perth Underground and Perth stations, which on a Monday and Tuesday night is the obvious answer.
• Anyone aged 15 or under must be accompanied by an adult, and every attendee needs a ticket, including infants.

Why four nights matters

RAC Arena holds roughly 15,000 people for a concert. Four nights is somewhere in the order of 60,000 tickets — in a city of 2.1 million, for a band whose last visit is old enough to have its own nostalgia.

Perth's relationship with touring acts has always been a negotiation with geography. We are the most isolated capital city on earth, the flight from the east coast costs a promoter real money, and the default outcome is that we get skipped. When a band of this size not only comes but opens here and stays for four nights, it is worth noticing.

Nine months to go. The queue was the easy part.

Photos: Raph_PH via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0), from Radiohead's 2025 European tour.