(...) Uncertainty, though, is about to get its lights punched clean out. By the time half an hour has passed, expectation is crackling in the air like a pair of nylon knickers in a thunderstorm. A roar that would do 10,000 wounded bull elephants proud goes up and, with all the brutal certitude of a cornered Prince Naseem, RADIOHEAD come on and proceed to pin all our unspoken shared anxieties in the white light of their expression.
They are the only band who make tiptoeing politely around hyperbole a pointless exercise, so to hell with it. Radiohead are simply the most thrilling, emotionally astute rock band this country has and, along with The Verve, they've made rock meaningful again. Live, the windtunnel of their feeling is almost overwhelming, but Thom Yorke, who's at the eye of this hurricane, understands the need to balance the fierce with the frail if either is to hit home. Somehow, he puts the finger on our collective accumulated hurt and presses. Hard. It's loathing and love pumped out in equal measure, always personal, never particular, mostly paranoid yet impressively unafraid, the sound of a band who know the "secret" to the sinkhole of this existence is not the question of believing in something bigger than yourself, or something better, but simply believing in something.
They come on to that creepy "fitter, happier" android voice, then blast away with "Airbag", all liquid, trembling guitar against crisp, military drums, Thom wailing half in pain, half in the wracked rapture of performance, "against the wall" his first terrible words. From high to higher they go - no fat, no fill, every song staggeringly focussed - through a sleazy, slow-drawled "Karma Police"; the quasi-operatic synths and spooky outerworld noises that surge through the icy "Exit Music", in which Thom takes desperation and fills it to the brim; his cheekily leading the hand-clapping to "My Iron Lung", where an isolated strobe dissolves the right side of his body in what looks like a blur of speed; a still-triumphant "Creep", Thom punching the air and thrusting his groin (cue involuntary girly shiver) perfectly in time with that guitar crunch and accompanying white light blast, an utterly panic-stricken "Paranoid Android"; and, peak of a range of Olympian sonic peaks, the gorgeous, planing "Climbing Up The Walls", where Thom howls like one of Francis Bacon's terrified, suffocating figures and the band, bathed first in gangrenous green light then flooded with nuclear orange, flash genuine funk by dipping into dark, dubby atmospherics.
Two encores - one four songs, the other two - and it's still not enough. Radiohead have fine-tuned the sounds of doubt and despair, amplified them and hoisted them higher than the sun. Sadness never felt so warm.
-Sharon O'Connell Melody Maker
13.10.97