Radiohead/ Asian Dub Foundation
The Point
Dublin
December 03, 2003

What’s most striking about tonight’s performance is that Radiohead’s so-called ‘tortured artists posturing’ is nowhere to be seen. The band that walks on stage is thoroughly in love with performing in front of a full venue of obsessed and demanding fans. Indeed, it’s difficult to believe that this is the same band who endured the touring turbulence so vividly depicted on their Meeting People is Easy documentary.

As expected, the set is very much built around Hail to the Thief, but there is also a generous smattering of the older classics; a notably terrific 'Climbing up the Walls' that explodes into an avalanche of Colin Greenwood’s bass, and a 'My Iron Lung' that has matured with age into something even more ferocious than the punk-rock assault it began life as all those years ago on The Bends. Even set certainties like 'Paranoid Android' are still delivered with a freshness and hunger that is impossible to imagine, given that Thom Yorke has already stood on stage several hundred time before singing the same opening lines.

Once again it is Jonny Greenwood’s capacity to leave you breathless that dominates. I would never tire of hearing the beefed up 'Go to Sleep' guitar solo that seeps into the end of the track. Likewise on 'Backdrifts' he tames the wiry electronic beast into another rock anthem. Of the newer material 'I Will' is strikingly desolate, and 'Where I End and You Begin' has now been cemented firmly into the ‘classics’ section. There’s a stunning rendition of 'How to Disappear Completely' with the customary "Float Down the Liffey" line that summons the loudest vocals of the night from the audience, and yet another cheeky grin from Mr Yorke.

To finish the set they rely on the delicately fragile; the anthemic sing-along and the electronically uplifting. 'Like Spinning Plates', is superbly delivered, and almost unrecognisable from the Amnesiac version. Really it’s one of the highlights tonight, and played surprisingly rarely given its beauty. Next comes an excellent 'Karma Police', just as we all thought it had been criminally left out of the set, and to close, the ever-brilliant 'Everything in Its Right Place'. And that was indeed the most apposite way to conclude a night when, everything was in its right place, and the thousands crammed into the Point were also fortunate enough to have been in the right place at the right time.

Eclectic Honey
07.12.03