It is hard to reconcile modern-day Radiohead with the band who marked their entrance with three vicious guitar blasts preceding the chorus of ‘Creep’ in 1992. Gone is lead singer Thom Yorke’s bleach blonde hair. Gone is the introspection. Gone, it could be argued, is the pop sensibility. But never has the ability to surprise and to subvert been stronger.

This is precisely what makes their impending return so very exciting. Unannounced artwork, in their distinctive, heavily abstract visual style, all inky blue atmosphere and soulless white figures, has made its way onto their official website. This, coupled with a spate of announcements of headline slots at festivals abroad, has signalled what we’ve known unofficially since 2014, when whispers of new studio sessions first reared their head: Radiohead is back.

But, of course, they never really left. Since their most recent album, The King of Limbs (2011), the Oxford-raised group have been individually rather busy. Thom Yorke casually formed the supergroup Atoms for Peace with some unknowns – namely Flea from Red Hot Chili Peppers and Joey Waronker of Beck and R.E.M. fame. Oh, and he also released a second solo album, Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes, in 2014. The man is unbelievably prolific.

Furthermore, multi-instrumentalist Jonny Greenwood has, through his eclectic collaborations with director Paul Thomas Anderson on The Master (2012) and Inherent Vice (2014), established himself as one of the most dynamic film composers working in Hollywood today. To cap off a trinity of creatives, drummer Phil Selway also released his second solo album in 2014, entitled Weatherhouse. Take a moment to consider that embarrassing run of releases during your next essay crisis.

Then there’s the issue of a small indie film named Spectre and the resulting Bond theme controversy. After they were rejected by the infinitely wise studio heads at Sony in favour of Sam Smith – because obviously the concept of Radiohead recording a Bond theme wasn’t exciting enough – the band released the rejected track for free online on December 25th 2015. Some Christmas present. But even aside from its intrinsic value, ‘Spectre’ represents an interesting musical crossroads. The heavily syncopated, electronica-drenched sound of The King of Limbs, particularly lead single ‘Lotus Flower,’ seems to have been ditched in favour of grand instrumentation and a return to more emotive and personal lyrics. Granted, this is not the first time for Radiohead to switch up its style, aesthetically moulding themselves to a film to which they have attached their music (see the impeccable ‘Exit Music (For A Film)’ which closes Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet). But the question remains: just how far does this foreshadow whatever release is forthcoming next year?

To observe Radiohead historically, each album contains traces of the next within its sonic vocabulary. OK Computer was quite a departure from its exceptional, late 90s indie boom predecessor The Bends in that it shied away from the guitar-driven indie rock of their previous fame. That, of course, led to arguably their best work, and many fans’ (this one included) favourite album, Kid A, ditching the guitars almost entirely for a more synthetic musical landscape. This development has continued similarly up until today, when their impending sound is once more up in the air.

Though in some ways, the excitement stems from escalation. To chart Radiohead’s sonic development is akin to charting the development of any given top author, or filmmaker – each album becomes a statement of intent, and between each album lies new confidence, experiments and genres, which is precisely what makes them so immediate, and so wonderfully relished in the annals of indie rock.

For Radiohead to produce yet another LP which reaches the band’s impenetrably high standards seems impossible. But to quote the band themselves, “You can try the best you can / the best you can is good enough.” Go on, lads.

Upon sitting down to a cup of tea with the director of the Imps, Adam Mastroianni, the first thing that struck me was how earnest he was in his hyperbole. He looked me straight in the eye, and declared “you have never seen anything like this before, and you may never see anything like it again.” His quite frankly alarming level of excitement about the Imps new show, Hyperdrive, I initially put down to the fact that he’s from Ohio, and like his countrymen, inevitably gets a little bit too riled up for his own good.

However, as we begin to talk about the concept behind Hyperdrive, I can’t help but feel myself succumbing to a touch of Yankee overexcitement. The basic idea behind the show is an ingenious fusion of very fiddly technology with the brute imaginative strength of the Imps for making stuff up. On the night in question, LMH’s Simpkin’s Lee theatre will be rigged up with 3 large projector screens, a smoke machine, and a drone mounted camera. With this array of tools, the Imps intend to create fake tinder accounts, spontaneously serenade people over facetime, utilise facebook and text messages to create an interactive and immersive hour of improv, that will hopefully make you think about the increasingly integrated and connected society in which we live. If this ludicrous array of gadgetry sounds exciting, then just imagine how Mastroianni feels about it – “a big kid in a sandbox full of new toys”.

The one niggle that I had at the back of my mind about this pitch was that it might be fall back on ‘let’s all have a laugh at funny old pictures on someone’s facebook whilst they squirm in their seats’. However, for the Imps, this would go completely against what improv is meant to be about – a reciprocal and constructive relationship between improvisers and their audience – nobody is going to be made a fool of, and you only have to get involved if you volunteer to.

Adam goes on to expound the values of improv, as a tool which teaches people to lower their inhibitions, be freer in their creativity, work communally together to construct something amazing. In short, to stop saying no, and start saying “yes, and?”

Mastroianni thinks that the UK is still a long way behind the US when it comes to improv – the art has yet to find a consistent audience outside of certain corners of the Fringe, and certainly hasn’t managed to break into the mainstream. The real problem with improv in Britain is that it relies on generic parody to draw crowds – ‘improv Doctor Who’ or ‘improv Downton Abbey’. However, Mastroianni thinks this infantilises UK audiences and presumes they don’t have the imagination or the enthusiasm to confront the genre on its own terms – something which he’s hoping to change.

The magic of improv for the Imps comes from the transience of it, no two improv shows will ever be alike, and everyone gets out of it just what they bring to it. As Mastroianni relates, it’s a bit like “the positive version of a car crash”, a single, fixed moment in time where normality is thrown out of the window and audience and performers are thrown together in (hopefully hilarious) bedlam. Adam leaves me asking you all to embrace a little bit of that haphazard spontaneity of the form – “this is really cool, trust us, come along”. Who knows what might happen on the night.

Hyperdrive is on at the Simpkins Lee Theatre, 11^th-13^th Feb, 8pm.

Blair, Thatcher, Poll tax, political awakening, gentrification and the disillusionment which accompanies growing up; these are all themes, which made an appearance in Luke Wright’s What I Learned from Johnny Bevan at the North Wall last Friday.

This was well balanced by the occasional effortless slip into a ‘made-in-Chelsea’ styled accent of Tilly or Milly and Nick’s panic at being considered racist, just because by the time he reached university, he had only ever met two black people (an experience to which I could utterly relate, growing up in moderately rural Essex). Luke’s energetic performance was utterly transfixing and his presentation of the reality of university life powerfully accurate.

He touches on the socially promoted expectation that you will meet your friends for life at university, defining this as people that fulfil certain unachievable expectations in your head, only to realise that people everywhere are just people, and wherever you go, you will always need some football team to pretend to support. The images of 1960’s high rises towering in the background served to situate the audience in reality. These were not just comical characters of an imaginary world. The failure of Blair’s government was a miserable reality for many.

The journey of Johnny from a poetical political dreamer to a wrecked squatter, terrified by the idea of repeating the pitiful life of a previous generation, yet ultimately drawn to that fate because of political parties which had failed to listen to voices like his, was a hard hitting punch of the unfairness of life; the presentation of both Johnny’s dreams and ultimate desecration, a slap of reality for any current student and a reminder to keep firmly fixed in the ultimate weaknesses of mankind. Indeed this was no easy ride for the audience; we all left fairly beaten up. Johnny’s desperate call to Nick: “Does it own you? It owns me everyday?” paints a tragic picture of a disappointed idealist. But for such dreamers, the performance grants no clear answer, apart from a warning of overestimating the world around you.

To perform poetry sole in a number of different characters for a whole hour is an impressive feat by anyone’s standards. Luke was meticulous in this task. As he took his final bow, the lady next to me expressed surprise that anyone could have that much stamina. This genre, a hybrid of poetry and theatre, is reminiscent to some degree of the works of Shakespeare and medieval epic poems. Dynamically presented, all in iambics and with an ending as upsetting as any tragedy, Luke Wright, in view of the current political state, is a poet to watch. Indeed according to Johnny Bevan, there are only two categories: ‘shit’ or ‘proper’ – there is no middle ground. That being the case, this performance was proper.