We start with the perspective shot - a short but sickening pan over the landscape that was British Rock '97 to reveal a scene bloating under the weight of its own indulgences. Close-ups: Fluffy (one last PVC threesome anthem before obscurity, girls?); Kula Shaker (eyes heavenward, mouths agape in satori or garden-variety stupidity); Supergrass (a teen-size rehab festival already in progress); and the ongoing cocaine death-rattle that is Oasis.
Then, off in their own quiet corner of the screen, Radiohead release OK Computer and the entire picture inverts. It was a subtly disturbing, weirdly emotive work about being drained of all emotion, of feeling one's insides slowly turned to clockwork by a world strangulating on its own modernity.
The thing radiated a nervous tension that, live, in a reasonable-sized concert venue, could sweep away entire audiences. Not quite a year ago, Radiohead set virtually the entire album on an unsuspecting Opera House crowd (if expecting "High and Dry" and "Creep" counts) and the effect was devastating. On a stark, efficient stage, making no unnecessary movements save for the disturbing tick-tocking of Thom Yorke's head, Radiohead torqued one band's malaise into the most arresting, affecting show that year.
But then a funny thing happened on the way to the Gardens. Somewhere in the intervening months, Radiohead transmogrified into the stadium behemoth only visited by Oasis in their wildest coke narcosis, and - more incredibly - they did it with an album roughly comparable in party-on mood to Albert Camus with a flanger. With "Creep" and "Dry" now relegated to rattling away in a closet somewhere very far away, Radiohead selling out 10,000-plus tickets for an evening of serene-yet-deeply-disturbing concept songs can only indicate one of two possibilities: 1) the mainstream is widening itself once again to accept subtlety and ambiguity and the tantalizing question rather than the prefab answer; or 2) they've been mistaken for Pink Floyd.
Context (as, uh, Marshall McLuhan said, probably) is everything. Radiohead still open with "Airbag" - still, in fact, play mostly the same set - as they did 10 months before, but the laser lights, the stink of burning rope, the high-pitched YEEEU!s and the sign admonishing "Warning: No Stage Diving" are wreaking some mighty odd retrofits to this year's model.
So welcome, conventioneers, to the widescreen edition of Radiohead. You'll notice Thom Yorke's head-wobble has now been retooled to a more violent snapping motion, and we've introduced new features like the bent-knee crouch and the hands-flailing-in-air manoeuvre. Some nuances in delivery may have been lost ("This next one's for all the people up in the grays and greens!"), but we trust you'll find this inflationary process more conducive to your stadium rock experience.
Which isn't to say enormous arena shows - like gargantuan movie complexes and unfeasibly large pepper mills - represent the end of everything small and poignant. Radiohead, in fact, bravely skip their more readily rock-ified numbers (except a swaggering "You Do It to Yourself") and glide into the weirder, darker corners of OK Computer and The Bends. And, in virtually every one, especially an even more darkly lullabyed "No Surprises," the nuances survive intact.
It's just that the ironic distance between the actual content of OK Computer (claustrophobic, paranoid, secretive) and the laser-lit spectacle (communal, air-punching, obvious) is large enough to drive several hardback editions of Being and Nothingness through, and Radiohead appear to sense the tension: "What're the fucking words?!" Yorke hollers halfway through "Bones," and socks the mic 'til it screams. Three-quarters through, when a kid up front showers him with Evian, he flips him the bird in riff time, then thrashes around as though trying to tear his way out of his own skin. At the song's end, he stares down at the broken mic stand - genial Tom again - and quips, "I'll have another of these, then."
Radiohead, to get Deepak Chopra about it, are transforming. Like Nirvana (way back before the earth cooled), they're moving from collectors' item to public property, and the upgrade (?) will change them. Tonight was the last time to see Radiohead in precarious but brilliant balance. On this side lies the unheard shadow-filigreed borders of art. On the other... um... Billy Corgan.
It's your move, Thom. Watch your step.
-C.J. O'Connor
Eye
16.04.98