Head on

Radiohead
Molson Park
Toronto
August 3, 2001

Rating: 4/5

With the attempted commercial suicide double-shot of Kid A and Amnesiac, Radiohead indicated that they'd rather make music for basement-gallery art installations than for places where they might come into contact with tossed beach balls. But, fortunately, they didn't make 25,000 of their fervent followers sit in three hours of long-weekend rush-hour traffic on the 400 for an evening of onstage Powerbook recording-software demonstrations.

In typically Radioheadian fashion, the show was as much a subversion of summertime concert spectacles as an embodiment of one. The two JumboTrons - normally an excuse for horny cameramen to assess the in-crowd hooter situation - instead documented the action in Blair Witch-style black-and-white video close-ups, offsetting the open-air expanse with a suffocating, queasy feeling. And it's not too often you hear an audience cheerfully clap along to a song as bleakly morose as "Exit Music (For a Film)."

But even Thom Yorke's Bono-esque mini-sermons ("This song is dedicated to all the people stuck in traffic, listening to the radio and wondering, 'What's the global economy doing for me?'") couldn't take away from the fact that this was a big-ass, good ol' fashioned, fun (yes, fun) Rock Show - Yorke spankin' the tambourine and showing off more moves in two hours than Liam Gallagher has in his entire career, Jonny Greenwood dropping dead-cool poses like a 21st-century Jimmy Page and an awesomely dramatic lighting display that made the Las Vegas strip seem about as bright as a wet candle. Funny - for a bunch of guys who say they don't want to be rock stars, they sure look good playing them.

The program was similar to the one presented at last fall's ACC stand - a punishing "National Anthem," a slam-pit-igniting "My Iron Lung," a house-throb redux of "Everything in Its Right Place" - but what made this more than just an expertly executed rerun was the way Radiohead brought Amnesiac's skeletal song sketches to life.

The unfortunate side effect of Amnesiac's drum-machine doodling is that it pushes one of rock's most underrated rhythm sections - bassist Colin Greenwood and drummer Phil Selway - even further to the fringes. But while most eyes at Molson Park were focused on Thommy, Jonny and the increasingly Hugh Grant-like guitarist Ed O'Brien, it was Colin and Selway who steered the ship into new territory: the skittering "Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box" was given an acid-funk transplant thanks to a deliciously nasty super-fuzzed bassline and unstoppable disco thump; "Dollars and Cents" was transformed from airy and spacy to taut and propulsive; and the devious "I Might Be Wrong" got a booty-shakin' groove on that its recorded version only vaguely hints at.

Radiohead have been called many things over the years: the next Pink Floyd, the next U2, the next REM - who knew they really wanted to be the next Stone Roses?

Stuart Berman

Eye
09.08.01