One to remember
 

Very few bands can boast a loyal fan base who are able to grow with a group that is dead-set on plugging new material, rather than revisiting their past glories.

Then again, there are very few bands like Radiohead.

Barely any convincing was necessary for the 20,000 who congregated last night at Jean Drapeau Park, on Montreal's Ste. Helene Island, to be seduced by the Oxford, England quintet, whose latest foray in a category-defying genre of (for lack of a better term) rock eschews your basic catering-to-radio formula.

Hence, to think "Creep" or "High and Dry" would even be touched during the band's two-hour set - drawn largely from last year's seminal Kid A and its kid brother Amnesiac, released this past June - missed the exercise completely.

Or did it? Against the weight of such electronica-based monsters as "Packt Like Sardines In A Crushd Tin Box" from Amnesiac and Kid A's "Everything In Its Right Place", second-encore surprise "Fake Plastic Trees" (from 1995's The Bends) almost seemed far too commercial. Yet to drop it in as a show-closer once in a while doesn't hurt - for the fans' sake, anyway.

SURPRISES

But then, Radiohead always have been chock full of surprises. Compared to the dour treatment frontman Thom Yorke, multi-instrumentalist Jonny Greenwood, his bassist brother Colin Greenwood, guitarist Ed O'Brien and drummer Phil Selway came across vis-a-vis the Grant Gee-directed flick Meeting People Is Easy - filmed during Radiohead's 1997-98 OK Computer tour - last night's visit was far more upbeat.

Musically, and visually.

Two giant screens on either side of stage showed every move, every smile, every wince. The collage of players resembled, at best, an European art film, at worst, a well-placed security camera. Yorke in particular had fun with the "piano-cam," pointing out all the insects on the white keys before launching into a riveting "Pyramid Song".

Riveting doesn't tell the half of it. From the opening one-two-three punch of "The National Anthem", "Morning Bell" and OK Computer's "Airbag", the star of the show was, in essence, the band.

Yorke's vocals rang crystal clear among the park audience, Jonny Greenwood's guitar, keyboards and sonic effects hit all the right grooves, Selway's time-perfect drum beats, with O'Brien and Colin Greenwood rounding out the precise rhythm section, struck all the right notes, in all the right places. Faults, if any, would only stir minor quarrels.

Fact is, much of the new material - with honourable mentions to the rockin' "I Might Be Wrong", Yorke's head-about-to-explode techno-crazy "Idioteque" and ethereal "You and Whose Army?" - was greeted with the kind of loud cheering usually reserved for the likes of "Karma Police" and that epic-of-all-epics, "Paranoid Android", which garnered likely the loudest response on the audience-meter.

With all the trappings of a bona fide live show - bouncing strobes, illuminating fluorescent bulbs and a coat of many screen colours - there was little doubt that Radiohead have raised the bar on live performance.

Let's hope that Radiohead - and perhaps Montreal turntablist extraorrdinaire Kid Koala and Scotland's The Beta Band - will be full of future surprises in the years to come.