All hail to Radiohead

Radiohead
Beacon Theater
New York
June 6, 2003

One doesn't want to cave into hype or hyperbole, but the evidence is staring us all squarely in the face: Radiohead might not be everyone's favourite band - for the record, it isn't mine - but Radiohead is, without question, very nearly the finest extant live rock act on this planet.

Perhaps the finest, actually, at present. Never particularly slack in the performance department to begin with, the religiously admired Oxford quintet soared into truly stunning, otherworldly musical territory during the tours that immediately followed its outwardly impossible-to-tour "career suicide" tandem of 2000's Kid A and 2001's Amnesiac. Just as those records demonstrated that insular, audience-indifferent avant-electronica could, in fact, prove just as successful on the Billboard Hot 200 as Christina Aguilera when placed in the right hands, Radiohead's subsequent, riveting on-stage interpretations of their contents put the lie to the notion that the post-Warp Records school of noodly laptop onanism would never make the grade as rock spectacle.

Those lessons learned, Radiohead returned to the North American stage Thursday night at New York City's Beacon Theatre = which, besides a 40-minute slot on Saturday at Giant Stadium for the disaster-plagued Field Day Festival, will be the group's only appearance on this side of the Atlantic until at least late summer. The group had the relaxed, confident air of a band operating at the height of its powers, but still too relentlessly focussed on forward creative momentum to slack off and coast on familiar formulas.
"It's a TV show, so we'll all be nervous and stressed as f---," frontman Thom Yorke had warned earlier in the week. But the performance - broadcast live to several Famous Players theatres in Canada (including a couple of sold-out locations in Toronto) and taped for future airing on MTV2 - hardly suffered from camera anxiety.

The music on Radiohead's brilliant new album, Hail To The Thief, was thoroughly road-tested prior to recording, and it shows. This was Radiohead lightening up just a touch and exploiting its remarkable internal chemistry with far less of the po-faced, recital-hall studiousness that marked the Kid A and Amnesiac shows. Maybe even having a spot of fun, too.

It helped the band, no doubt, to have a wholly supportive crowd egging it on. Most of the 3,000 concert-goers had moved heaven and earth, camping out on sidewalks or forking out hundreds of dollars on E-bay, to acquire their $2 tickets.

The ordeal didn't stop with simply nabbing a pass, either: Getting a prime spot at the Beacon meant spending your entire Thursday afternoon and most of the evening snaking through lineups that stretched the length of four city blocks while less fortunate fans moped about forlornly on the fringe, waving signs that read "Will do ANYTHING for tickets" and "I feel my luck could change."
A jubilant atmosphere prevailed inside and outside nonetheless. Discussion invariably returned to Hail To The Thief, with which everyone, it seemed, was already entirely familiar, despite the fact that the album isn't officially released until Tuesday. Such is the power of the Internet, in fact, that the chap behind me could, without fail, belt out every single word to every single song on the set list, from oldies like "Climbing Up The Walls" and "Karma Police" to such supposedly under-wraps new material as "A Punchup At A Wedding" and "Sit Down. Stand Up."

The energy was infectious, and Radiohead gave it back in kind. Opening with Thief's melancholic first single, "There There," and the bleak "2 + 2 = 5," the band had the room utterly hysterical by the time Colin Greenwood's snarling bassline to Kid A's "The National Anthem" burst from the PA.

Of the new material, more direct "rock" moments such as the brooding, New Order-esque "Where You End And I Begin," the snaky groove of "Punchup" and the yearning piano ballad "Sail To The Moon" went down slightly better than the abstract loops and crackles of "Backdrifts" and the ever-so-slightly tedious bleating of "The Gloaming." But, as on its last couple of tours, Radiohead proved startlingly adept at flitting between cold futurism (the Aphex Twin-checking poom-poom-pooms of "Kid A" and "Everything In Its Right Place") and the space-age guitar-rock fireworks of Jonny Greenwood and Ed O'Brien exemplified by Amnesiac's "I Might Be Wrong" and OK Computer's epic "Paranoid Android."

The biggest numbers capitalized on the band's acute sense of prog-rock drama and dynamics and Yorke's devastating voice. A delicate run through the resigned ballad "No Surprises" was an early showstopper, and Yorke's third-encore solo turn on "True Love Waits" was as sweet as Radiohead gets. It was a late-set, whisper-to-scream-to-whisper version of The Bends' "Fake Plastic Trees" (Radiohead's "Wish You Were Here"), though, that brought the band's full power to bear and drew tears from dozens of awed patrons in the theatre.

For a band that professes not to be interested in being a rock band, Radiohead had achieved one of the finest lighters-out rock `n' roll moments this critic has ever witnessed. May they never fail.

Ben Rayner

Toronto Star
08.06.03