Radiohead/Laika
Theatre Antique
Arles
June 13, 2000

Radiohead's decision to embark on a low-key, off-the-beaten-track summer tour of Europe nearly backfired from the kick-off Tuesday (June 13) night when a cataclysmic downpour threatened to sabotage the band's opening night in an ancient open-air theatre in Arles, France.

The Theatre Antique, built by the Romans in the age of the emperor Augustus, was deluged with rain for almost half an hour as the English band waited to take the stage, its equipment protected by mini-marquees and plastic sheets. Then when the rain did subside, the band's acclaimed light show packed up for three songs. "Y'like it dark, don't ya?," Thom Yorke mumbled before launching into an understandably rather uncertain version of "Karma Police."

By the end of the two-hour set, the band's first live performance in over two years, Radiohead had fought off the damp and the dark and served notice that it remains the most original and compelling rock band on the planet. As the few thousand sodden spectators -- mostly French, but with a smattering of fans from elsewhere in Europe and from America and Asia -- trooped out into Arles' empty streets, their faces bore broad, approving smiles.

To say that Radiohead was tentative at times, and messy at others, is only to underline the context of the Arles performance. Regarded as the saviors of Rock As We Know It -- in the fine tradition of U2 and R.E.M. -- the band has just finished recording the follow-up (or follow-ups, if current rumors are anything to go by) to OK Computer, by many reckonings the most majestic rock album of the last decade. Low-key the show may have been, but what it portended for the future meant that there was still a heavy weight hanging on the Oxford quintet's slender shoulders.

"Bonsoir, tout le monde!" were Yorke's opening words -- a gesture Liam Gallagher would probably not have bothered with, and one which quickly earned the crowd's affection. The opening song was "Talk Show Host," long a favorite of Radiohead fans-in-the-know, and superb it was, too: chopped rock-funk guitars over a propulsive circular groove, with splashes of analog synth behind inimitable Yorke lines like "You want me/Fuckin' well come and find me!"

From then on the set was a blend -- often an uneasy one -- of assured numbers from The Bends and OK Computer and preview material from the forthcoming album(s). Firm favorites like "Bones" and "Just" spat and crackled with three-guitar venom; slower-building Computer classics like "Lucky" and "Exit Music" enveloped the crowd in dense webs of melody and counterpoint. Then came the new material, inserted at more or less regular intervals between the failsafe crowd-pleasers.

Fully aware that there were probably many hidden "recording devices" in the audience, the band played seven new numbers. All pushed back the boundaries of Radiohead's music, moving still further from the drab orthodoxy of their early Pablo Honey days. Not one of them could have been described as big or anthemic: if OK Computer made Radiohead's record label nervous, Capitol will surely be shitting bricks after hearing the new material.

"Optimistic" was moody and muted, as was the warmer "Morning Bell," sung mainly in falsetto and arranged in 5/4 time, a typical Radiohead signature. "Dollars and Cents" was more spacious, opening out into soaring Yorke vocal lines on its chorus, but it was hardly "The Tourist." And then there was the monochordal grunge-fuzz of "National Anthem," with Jonny Greenwood miking the "found sound" of a transistor radio and the others grinding away over Phil Selway's pounding sixteenths. Even compared to, say, "Electioneering," this sounded like so much over-egged white noise.

"In Limbo" was formless but pleasingly dreamy, with Ed O'Brien at the keyboard and Selway providing jazzy drum fills, but "Everything in Its Right Place" -- based around electric piano chords that sounded like old Steely Dan or Stevie Wonder outtakes -- was a half-assed experiment masquerading as a song. Radiohead has every right to retreat from "rock," but one wonders where this new music is going, if it's going anywhere at all. Doubtless it was a precautionary measure to make the last new number, "Knives Out," the most accessible one. With Yorke strumming an acoustic and O'Brien harmonising nicely, the song could almost have been a more truculent Travis.

While the new material will start to sound more lived-in as this Euro-jaunt progresses, what stirred the youth of Arles were the sweeping mega-ballads -- "Lucky," "Street Spirit," "Exit Music," "No Surprises," "Climbing up the Walls" -- and the post-grunge blasts of angry angst ("Bones," "Just," "My Iron Lung"). Not to mention the songs that combine both, most obviously a full-throttle encore of "Paranoid Android." Not that Radiohead ever plays it safe, as the constant experimenting of Greenwood made only too clear. Slashing away at his guitar or hunched over keyboards and pedals, the band's boy genius spent much of the evening warping and mangling his sound to splendid effect.

"Thank you for being so nice on our first gig back," muttered the ever-self-conscious Yorke after penultimate encore "Nice Dream." No audience will ever be anything but nice to Radiohead again, but Yorke can't be alone in wondering just how hard a sell their new music will be. "Oh, you know this one," he said, introducing "Street Spirit" after "Dollars and Cents." "Phew!"

It goes without saying that Radiohead is under no obligation to save white rock and roll -- like all great artists, they should be free to do exactly as they please. But let us hope that in their occasionally willful desire to stake out new ground they don't chuck out the baby with the bathwater.

Radiohead set list:

1. "Talk Show Host"
2. "Bones"
3. "Optimistic"
4. "Karma Police"
5. "Planet Telex"
6. "Morning Bell"
7. "Dollars and Cents"
8. "Street Spirit"
9. "National Anthem"
10. "My Iron Lung"
11. "No Surprises"
12. "Climbing up the Walls"
13. "Lucky"
14. "In Limbo"
15. "Exit Music"
16. "Airbag"
17. "Everything in Its Right Place"
18. "Just"
19. "Knives Out"
20. "Nice Dream"
Encore:
"Paranoid Android"

-Barney Hoskyns

CDNOW
14.06.00