Radiohead/ Willy Mason
Hummingbird Centre
Toronto
June 7 + 8, 2006
I.
People get very,
very excited about Radiohead. Witness:
It’s Tuesday night, and
after eight hours of nonstop menial labour changing fucking light bulbs in a
downtown office building, I’m sitting at home reading a month-old copy of The
Economist and doing everything I can not to pass out on the couch. The first
of two Radiohead concerts is tomorrow, and I’m sort of in that curious state of
having to juggle emotional jubilance with staggering physical exhaustion, but it
looks at this point like the body is winning. Just as I start to feel some drool
collecting at the corner of my mouth, my cell starts humming in my pocket. Thank
god. I need something to do.
“Stephens!”
“Yo.”
“It’s Dave, man, listen, Ryan and I are getting together at my
place tonight, we’re having a Radiohead primer party.”
“A Radiohead
primer party. Umm. What does that entail?”
“Basically, man, we’re
gonna get high and listen to Radiohead. How soon can you be here?”
Can’t
argue with that. Half an hour later I’m sitting on Dave’s bed, plowing through a
bunch of Amnesiac b-sides on my iPod, periodically contributing to (but
mostly just sitting agape at) a dialogue that starts to approach schoolgirl
levels of giddiness:
“Man, if they play ‘Paranoid Android’ tomorrow,
man, I’m just gonna lose my shit.”
“Look, I know ‘Pyramid Song’ is
awesome, but I just don’t think they could pull it off live, without all those
ridiculous strings.”
“If someone yells out ‘Creep!’ I’m gonna find their
seat, push through the aisle, jump off the balcony if need be and just slit
their fucking throat.”
“Hey Stephens, did you get your tickets free
through that dickish hipster website?”
“Honestly, guys, I don’t care
what they play, I could care less if they just do the whole set running
through the national anthems of former Soviet colonies, or if Jonny plays
nothing but a goddamn oboe the entire night, I don’t care. It’s Radiohead, so
it’s just a given that it’ll be fucking life-altering.”
All these
feverish declarations, all coming from pretty cynical guys, not prone to leaping
to such excitable conclusions about a show by a band they’ve never seen play
before. But such is the effect of Radiohead, almost unquestionably the most
influential and ubiquitous “alternative” rock band of the last decade. They can
unite different types of music fans like no other modern band I can think of
(one of the guys I was hanging out with was a DMB fan, the other mostly listens
to free jazz, and they’re quite obviously the tie that binds between the hippies
and hipsters at Bonnaroo this year), all while exploring a sonic palette so
diverse and inclusive (though immediately distinct) you wonder how so many
people are able to keep up so willingly.
Who am I kidding, you know all
this shit anyway.
II.
I go to the first show,
on Wednesday night, with Mitch, this cartoonishly friendly guy who lived on
campus with me last year, and just kind of called me out of the blue a couple
weeks beforehand to invite me. We aren’t even really close friends, but I like
the guy an awful lot. I’d spent the ensuing time almost avoiding him, out of
this ridiculous fear that I’d say something off-putting and he would just offer
the ticket to someone else on a whim. Luckily, my charm pulled through, and we
found ourselves sitting in a kind of stunned silence while the crowd filed in,
eyeing the roadies carefully as they milled about the stage, checking our
watches every 30-odd seconds, and finding ourselves at a total loss for anything
to say to each other.
Finally, this creepy-sounding, digitally
manipulated speech loop takes over on the speaker system, and though the house
lights are still on, people leap out of their seats and start screaming
themselves hoarse. The house lights shut off abruptly, and when the stage lights
go on, we see Thom sitting at a piano surrounded by the rest of the band, a
close-up of his face broadcast on several video screen fragments set up behind
him. This is a sight familiar to anyone who’s been to a Radiohead show in the
last five years: the band lurches into a sturdy version of “You and Whose Army,”
complete with typical Yorkean mugging, marred only by the fact that by the time
the song’s harrowing coda comes around, Thom’s piano is almost completely
drowned out by the guitar.
After a mesmerizing one-two punch of Kid
A semi-favourites “The National Anthem” and “Morning Bell,” the band starts
into “15 Step,” the first of eight new songs they would play tonight, mostly
done in pairs. Like many of these debutantes, it’s disarmingly spare, seemingly
more focused on rhythm than melody. It isn’t immediate, but you can probably
dance to it, and the band plays it with enough conviction that the audience eats
it all up like it was “Fake Plastic Trees” or something. The next one, “Open
Pick,” rides a pretty unbelievable guitar riff, using it as a pretty constant
groove as this claustrophobic song gains momentum.
There’s a bit of an
embarrassing moment during the next song, “Exit Music.” While Thom strums away
solo at the opening verse, we hear the predictable hooting and hollering – “Thom
Yorke, you’re fucking sexy!”; “You guys rock, yaarrrrrgggghhh!”;
“Creeeeeeeeeep!!!” – which is bad enough, but then for every obnoxious yelp
there happens to be another person there to yell “shut the fuck UP!” just to
help this situation. These killjoys even choose to vent their frustration at the
section of the audience that quite innocently opts to clap along, who in turn
scream at their dissenters to shut up, while the rest of us cringe in
horror. I suppose this would be an opportune point to go into the negative
aspects of the division that exists in the personalities of Radiohead’s fanbase,
and the divergent attitudes they bring to concert etiquette. But again, that’s
shit you already know. Anyway, Thom just keeps on playing.
And so the
band continues solidly on for another hour and a half, with a setlist that
leaves a little to be desired (I don’t imagine anyone in the building came here
yearning to rock out to “Dollars and Cents,” especially at the expense of so
many neglected Bends and OK Computer classics), but is
nevertheless barely faultable. The crowd receives all the new songs with almost
shocking affection – even the more subdued ones, like the brooding mindfuck
“Videotape” and the jarringly straightforward piano ballad “4 Minute Warning”
(my runaway favourite of the newbies, at the moment) keep most of the audience
on its feet. Even songs whose studio incarnations leave me cold (like “The
Gloaming” and, I’m sorry, but “Myxomatosis”) absolutely kill on stage,
and as the band closes before the encore with impeccably intense renditions of
“Idioteque” and “How to Disappear Completely,” I’m so enraptured I can barely
register my own existence.
Mitch, for his part, makes me look almost
blasé. He spends most of the two hour set leaping up and down like a sugar-high
8-year old ADHD patient on Christmas morning, and when the band opens the encore
with “Airbag,” he can’t restrain himself from hugging me. “Pyramid Song” is
played, despite my buddy’s earlier reservations, and comes off quite nicely,
with Jonny using the old guitar-with-bow trick with not-too-kitschy results. By
the time the set closer “Everything in its Right Place” ends with a digital loop
similar to the one that opened, the crowd can barely contain its reverence, and
upon herding out of the lobby, I overhear several conversations with similar
worshipful wackiness to the one I took part in the previous night. I also see
Dave, standing alone outside, with a smile on his face, looking like he’d just
had the best sex of his life. Ringing ears and all, I return home to a night of
tossing and turning, and get adorably anxious worrying about whether or not
they’ll play “Paranoid Android” the next night.
III.
The next night, I go alone. I’m way the
fuck back in the balcony, at the very far left, but the excellence of a
place like the Hummingbird Centre (a theater most often used for ballets and
similar highbrow fare, as well as the occasional Dora The Explorer gig)
means that I can still see and hear perfectly. Hell, I’m happier to be
here on my own; while Mitch’s exuberance the previous night was kitten-cute, I’m
relishing the opportunity to take it all in without any distractions, especially
considering my convictions that all of the old favourites they neglected last
night would almost certainly feature tonight.
My suspicions prove true:
after opening fiercely with a nasty version of “The Gloaming” (replete
with Thom’s awesome temper-tantrum dance moves, which I find myself
unconsciously imitating by the end of the set) and equally intense newcomers
“Bangers n’ Mash” and “15 Step,” the show segues into the absolutely fucking
dazzling back-to-back-to-back homers of “2+2=5,”“Kid A” and “Fake Plastic
Trees.” The first was explosive, and should be legally required to be played at
every Radiohead concert – Thom’s crazed vocals and the band’s supernatural
tightness elevate it above even the thrilling studio version, and it’s a joy to
see the audience screaming like maniacs for a song so musically and thematically
sinister. The second is a song I would never expect to translate well to live
performance, but it ends up having the same glacial resonance as its studio
counterpart, even with Thom opting against roboticizing his vocals. “Fake
Plastic Trees” is practically heartwarming, the whole crowd audible in a warm
and fuzzy sing-along, and breaking into a huge cheer as the drums hammer in to
announce the climax, while Thom’s voice echoes angelically through the theater.
I am slack-jawed.
The new songs sound even more muscular and confident
than the night before, and beyond just standing and cheering politely, about
half the crowd eagerly shakes their asses to the ones that invite that kind of
thing. A brand new one, “Down is the New Up,” debuts tonight, and is a bit of an
anomaly amongst the new songs in that it doesn’t spend too much time in the same
place, working in, by my count at least, three fairly distinctive movements.
“Spooks,” another newbie that was neglected the night before, is the most
hysterically fun thing the band’s ever done, a minute-long surf guitar
instrumental sounding a bit like the bridge from an early Pixies track played by
extraterrestrials. More old favourites, like “Karma Police,”“Climbing Up the
Walls” and (yes, yes, omfg yes) “Paranoid Android” are run through, with such a
revelatory passion that you’d never guess they’re nearing a decade old.
Perennial “expected-to-be-included-on-the-next-record” drifter “Nude” is played,
for once sounding at home in this diverse but understated set of new songs. The
fact that it’s featured both nights lends more than a little hope that it will
finally see the light of day in the studio, even if some of us secretly wish it
had been “True Love Waits” getting all this renewed attention instead.
Anyway, the encore is once again sterling, opening with “You and Whose
Army” (of course he did the camera thing again, what the hell do you think),
followed by “Bodysnatchers,” then satiating us salivating dogs with heroic
send-ups of “Just” and “Let Down,” before returning once more to close out with
“There There”. On the whole, I’m even more pleased with this second show than
the first – they’d played most of the songs I was dying to hear, endeared the
new ones to me even further, and, with “Kid A”, even threw out a sizeable
curveball. Whereas I left last night in a huff of irrepressible,
I-should-be-too-old-for-this merriment, I leave tonight with a deeply satisfied
grin, similar, I imagine, to the one I saw on my friend last night.
IV.
So yes, people certainly do get very
excited about Radiohead, and as you can tell, I am no exception. While it might
have been nice to approach the concert and this subsequent review with some
semblance of journalistic objectivity, what good would it have done really? You
and every other fan of modern pop music has an opinion on Radiohead already,
whatever it is, and with a band so ubiquitous and polarizing, it’s inevitably a
pretty rigid one that’s not likely to be altered in any way by some rambling
concert review. And seriously, how could I do it anyway? Radiohead is a looming,
monolithic entity, perhaps the only truly canonized artist in rock still at the
very cutting edge of their genre. What other 15 year-old band could keep 3,000
people on their feet and mesmerized through a set almost half comprised of brand
new songs? Or cause people to have pre-show gatherings at their houses to listen
to songs they’re probably just gonna hear the next night anyway? Or buy tickets
for, like, half their annual part-time job income on e-bay? What other band’s
music is so transcendent that every female I know who was in attendance insisted
that their plainly hideous lead singer was a veritable stud (seriously, that
kind of shocked me…)?
All there is that I can say, really, is that this
is a band that sounds rejuvenated and excited to be playing together again, one
whose fairly inexhaustible creative spirit seems undiminished after this
extended hiatus, and one that might just feel like bringing back the rawk
whenever they decide to get around to finishing up album #7. It might not be
quite worth $1,500 or a kidney, but for anyone with so much as a casual
appreciation for the band, these shows were hard to beat and, best of all, still
left me wondering what was coming next.
Matt Stephens
CokeMachineGlow
15.06.06