Too many good songs to fit in

Radiohead/ Willy Mason
Empress Ballroom
Blackpool
May 12, 2006

For most rock bands, ageing is a struggle. Oasis, Primal Scream, the Charlatans, they're all still capable of good music. But to see these veterans gig today, with their booze-worn grimaces and unsuitably trendy haircuts, brings the uneasy feeling that these are middle-aged men playing at being pop stars.

Not so with Radiohead. This is curious because, having formed 20 years ago, they've been around as long as, or longer than, all of the above. Yet on Friday's first show of this mini-tour, three years after their most recent album Hail to the Thief, they looked fresh, at ease, untroubled by passing years or fashions. Their age suits them.

Perhaps it's because, in a sense, they were never young in the first place. During Britpop, everyone else wrote about Club 18-30 holidays, cigarettes and alcohol, Es and wizz. Radiohead? Driver airbags, saturated fats and the IMF.

Over their two decades, they've amassed such an arsenal of awesome songs that they can alter their setlist radically each night. Indeed, Radiohead's greatness can be judged by the songs they don't play, as much as by the songs they do. "No Surprises", "Fake Plastic Trees", "Karma Police", "Street Spirit", "Just" - these are some of the past 20 years' most extraordinary tracks. All are left out.

Disappointing? No - because they still offer a sublime "Paranoid Android", a majestic "Planet Telex", a towering "There There", a crushing "My Iron Lung". They've simply written more good songs than they've got time to fit in - and this is a two-hour show. There are few, if any, bands today about whom the same could be said. It's doubtful that, say, Red Hot Chili Peppers could satisfy a stadium if they discarded "Under the Bridge", "Give It Away" and "By the Way".

Six songs are new. A return to the driving emotional rock of The Bends? Or a Kid A-style plunge into the unknown? Both, but more of the former. For example, "Bangers 'N' Mash", which is fast and tetchy, with frontman Thom Yorke hammering at a drum kit while singing. (Yorke has always liked prog-rock, but few can have foreseen the day he'd turn into Phil Collins.)

Then there's "Bodysnatchers", which suggests a livelier Joy Division, with Yorke twisting and jerking in the demented puppet-on-strings manner of that band's singer Ian Curtis. "Nude" is the kind of ballad Radiohead practically patented, building - like "Exit Music" and "How to Disappear Completely" - from a subdued start to a climactic wail. "Arpeggi" is pacier, with a shrill guitar line of the sort U2 pioneered on their Joshua Tree album.

By contrast, "15 Step" is computerised experimentation, and at the end sounds a bit like the similarly avant-garde "Idioteque" from Kid A being sucked down a plughole. "House of Cards" is odder still - if only because it's so uncharacteristically pleasant and light.

All very promising. The only bad news for fans is that it's still unknown when these tracks will go on sale; Radiohead's name doesn't appear on album release schedules for 2006. But for a band for whom time is, visibly, no enemy, there's no need to rush.

Michael Deacon

Daily Telegraph
15.05.06