Radiohead/Laika
Bridlington Spa
Bridlington
September 4, 1997

SOMETIMES, you wake up to find the sunlight directed straight into your tortured, blairy eyes. You wake to find the day already well beyond beginning, active, intensely and unforgivably underway. And it hurts, the strain of joining something so frenzied, like the equal and opposite reaction to jumping off a still-moving bus. You trip, you stumble, panic as the ground looks all too near, too rough, too malevolent. But somehow you land, safe, stable and steady.

Radiohead's "Paranoid Android" lands, solemn and anguished amid sudden calmness. Flits in a freeform flail between episodes any one of which would challenge many bands' entire canons. When Jonny Greenwood finds his arm pulled tenderly up and viciously down like the victim of some universal practical joke, when his guitar starts to cut up deep red slashes through the spectral hymnal section, the world could end outside, Armageddon come and no one in here would even notice. Light dissolving our fractured sight, we stumble captive and zombified into the day.

LAIKA are night. The rumbling bass of 3am cargo trains, the cataclysmic beat of unseen industry; Margaret Fiedler's voice almost lost inside its own whispers; the trilling, pattering pops and whirrs which make Laika so refreshing and crisp on record growing increasingly frenzied like a plague of starving locusts, whipped and stirred into a paranoid flurry by Guy Fixen's darting fingers.

"Bedbugs" especially injects so much volume and gravity into the rapidly filling hall that people all around stand bewildered by the contrast between the clamorous intensity inside and the peaceful serenity of the sleepy, coastal town outside. Yes, this music 's sinister. Yes, it 's dark and cinematic in its oddly welcoming sense of panic. But it 's also perfectly timed, tailored to the dance it invokes. And, as the beat tries to empty our stomachs from the outside, it 's hard to stay sane, let alone still.

"Still kisses with saliva", comes the electronic, emotionless monody as a taped "Fitter, Happier" introduces RADIOHEAD to an unaccustomed, ecstatic Spa. As four-word manifestos go, you 'd be hard pressed to find another so succinct.

Still. The continuity lies in the way old songs like the tragic panorama of "Banana Co." or the engulfing unity of "Lurgee" sit as comfortably as any Radiohead song next to the barred, denied utopia of "Subterranean Homesick Alien" or the joyous release of "Maquiladora". Radiohead are still what they were. Radiohead will still be what they still are. Radiohead are kisses.

Butterfly kisses down the spine to match the nervous butterflies Jonny sends into our stomachs as "Exit Music (For A Film)" shudders into a relentless roar. The kiss before dying of "No Surprises" as Thom Yorke wraps a single, shaken voice around us in comfort, sighing "You look so tired, unhappy" to the accompaniment of 3,000 broken hearts of glass tinkling to the floor. The mad, passionate, fatalistic kiss of "Creep", its desperate need to belong (or is it escape?) almost unbearable as Thom hits that note, arms flapping in abandon, and holds it long enough for us to lose our breath, melt, flow, freeze and breathe again, mouths drained of saliva.

Saliva. Love and hate. Kiss and spit. "You want me? Fucking come and get me" snaps Thom on "Talk Show Host". That 'd be spit, then. The song begins to run into itself, doubling up with cramp as Phil Selway splits in two and sprays bullet-like percussion across the room, Ed O'Brien's wah-ed guitar spitting filthy, sodden splashes of sound into the crowd like tobacco into an overful spittoon.

Saliva. Hate and love. Love. Thom's voice hovers, a heavy, grey cloud barely kept afloat by the swaying torpor of "Fake Plastic Trees". Then, in a flash of dissolution, he collapses into a downpour of warm, springtime rain. Thunder severs the moment as Jonny twists and flicks his stick-thin body, dragging the song into a blizzard. It 's at moments like this that Radiohead rise unquantifiably above their "miserable sods" non-image and simply become more perfect an embodiment of The Way You Feel than anyone really has the right to.

Love, as Thom waggles his head during "Airbag". He steps forward towards the crowd as disturbingly sweet as the Tamagochi pet which dangles from Jonny's belt and spasmodically convulses his entire body into random shapes with a newfound confidence.

Love, as a closing "Street Spirit" falls into its next step. If you pulled the plugs now, you couldn 't help but feel that this tremor, these waves of pathos would somehow remain.

So we close our eyes as if in a prayer and, when we open them again, Radiohead are gone. But, kissing us with saliva, the music is still, somehow, here.

-Robin Bresnark

Melody Maker
13.09.97