One piano, 20 million YouTube views and Radiohead's official tick of approval: Josh Cohen brings Radiohead for Solo Piano II to Melbourne Recital Centre.
There are plenty of pianists covering Radiohead on YouTube, but Josh Cohen is the only one the band actually endorsed.
The Berlin-based Australian pianist is bringing Radiohead for Solo Piano II to Elisabeth Murdoch Hall at Melbourne Recital Centre on 15 April. The show is built around Cohen’s inventive, improvised solo piano arrangements drawn from the band’s extensive back catalogue — renditions that have accumulated more than 20 million views on YouTube. Cohen is one of the only artists on the planet with Radiohead’s direct approval to release songbooks of their music through publisher Faber Music.
Josh Cohen — Radiohead for Solo Piano II
- Melbourne Recital Centre, Elisabeth Murdoch Hall
- 15 April 2026
- Tickets here
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Cohen’s approach fuses classical technique with jazz improvisation, pulling the songs apart and reassembling them in ways that shift every time he sits down at the keys. His playing channels the energy of a live electronic set while weaving in spacious, atmospheric textures — a combination that gives each performance an unpredictable edge. The Melbourne show will also feature a visual installation custom-built exclusively for Cohen by AV artist Joshua Batty of MindBuffer, with all visuals improvised in real time alongside the music.
Born in Auckland and now based in Berlin, Cohen trained in both classical and jazz performance before developing an improvisational style that sits somewhere between the two. His first officially endorsed songbook, Radiohead for Solo Piano, was published through Faber Music in 2019 with cover art from Radiohead’s longtime visual collaborator Stanley Donwood. A second volume followed in November 2024, again featuring Donwood’s artwork alongside a new collection of arrangements from across the band’s discography.
The visual component of the Melbourne show comes courtesy of MindBuffer, Joshua Batty’s Berlin-based audiovisual studio. MindBuffer’s immersive installations have previously featured at Burning Man and White Night Melbourne, and Batty’s real-time projections for Cohen’s show are custom-built and performed live — responding to the music as it unfolds.
Beyond his Radiohead work, Cohen released a debut album of original solo piano compositions titled Weird Time Signature in 2023 through his own label DNTWIG. In 2021, he live-streamed a nine-and-a-half-hour series of weekly piano improvisations from Clifton Hill in Melbourne, and in 2024 he recorded a 27-minute organ improvisation at a church in the south of France.
He’s currently building the Emergency Piano Hotline, an officially licensed online tutorial platform for his Radiohead arrangements.
For more information, head here.
