YOU go in with a faint throb behind the temples and leave with a tension headache splitting yer skull that has nothing to do with the volume. But more of that anon. Firstly, that Other Pop Music Thang.
TEENAGE FANCLUB: "After 30 you can't be angry" - Jesus f***ing Christ. I try to penetrate the near-demented devotion this band inspire in so many, to no avail. TFC are so grubbily persistent it's not even as if you love'em or hate'em, it's more like you either stick up for them or you're totally indifferent, and tonight's Great TFC set is just like every other Great TFC set I've ever seen. A kid taps me on the shoulder and asks, "Who are this lot?" "Teenage Fanclub," I say. "Pffft," a roll of the eyes and he's off. Absolutely.
DJ SHADOW fills the intermission with his fearless brand of avant hop. Well, he plays his own records and occasionally deigns to scratch up a couple of Seventies soul-sides with his spare wrist - unforgiveably lazy really. He leaves the decks after "Midnight", and the kind of applause ripple that' so weedy you wince. A 10-minute pause. A couple of dub plates. Lights out. A held breath. Then all hell breaks loose.
Maybe it's the fact that you leave
with less pinned down about RADIOHEAD than you came in with, that's the
essence of tonight's performance. In 1997, what Radiohead have done is
take the metaphysical, sexual, political and artistic inconclusiveness
of their outlook and applied it to everything they do. Advocating nothing,
defined by what they're not, the space they exist in is a militant and
extremist refusal of definition. Neither meaningless nor meaningful, timely
nor timeless, communal nor intimate, they're rushing along in the chaos
between, constantly engaged in frantically holding anything that might
approach a position at bay. It's the diametric opposite of rock'n'roll,
which has always surged for the edges of experience, for the first Yes
or the final No. Radiohead reject that impulse in favour of a genuinely
unsettling ambiguity and suggestiveness that compels each song onwards,
that festers under their skin to make every second of every song respond
to the trapped moment of confusion it finds itself in, unable to look forward,
unwilling to look back.
Put simply, rock'n'roll tells you
something: Radiohead are stuck in the middle of EVERYTHING, trying to conduct
the traffic, sculpt their curious exile into some kind of shape, trying
to break apart any shape as soon as it manifests, because the next moment
has already changed everything. The impossible depth and infinite contradiction
that is modern life deserves an impossible, infinite sound, and it's found
no better, more lethally accurate exposition than in Radiohead's blazing
irreductive roar. All hell is about to break loose.
Sloping on to a reception like thunder, "Airbag" is as mind-melting an intro as any other band on earth can claim right now, actually sounding like an interstellar burst, Thom, as ever, letting the rush bolt tight his spine and let his head flail free and possessed, Jonny (still the most f***able man in pop) a perfect, near-painted amalgam of every single classic lead guitar stance ever created (full-bodied hair whip, spindly, pigeon-toed-crouch), but gorgeous enough to make them all seem implausibly fresh. Already, the sheer rage and vividness of Radiohead's sound has set our heads on fire and their biggest stadium tour so far is starting to feel so small - no one else can fill space with so much noise, volume and sheer electric wow.
"My Iron Lung", like so many songs tonight, lulls you into a calm only to rip you screaming maniacally from it, the see-saw riff hyping the hall to near boiling point and we're only two songs in. "Karma Police" is starting to replace "C***p" in the fan's affections; tonight it's dug like an anthem, but bursts through as turned-in and implosive as possible - "phew, for a minute there/I lost myself" chorused to the rafters but sounding eerily isolated, poignantly walled-off. "The Bends" is a real anthem that spins the focus out, the tri-pronged guitar drench never more engulfing, Jonny drowning the "I wish..." rap with some unholy atonal blitz that scatters across the PA in viral waves.
"Exit Music (For A Film)" provides the first really astonishing moment of the night, Colin and Ed's rhythm section chunking out stop-start funk that's phat as f***, before "Fake Plastic Trees" kicks off another Welsh chorus which is even stranger, given the lyrics' wintry bleakness. "Paranoid Android" is "for everyone who was at Glastonbury" and nearly matches that magical night; you realise Radiohead tower so far above the rest of Britrock simply by MAKING MORE THAN ONE SOUND with their guitars over the course of a song. The squeals and squirms and glibbles (oh, yes) that a near-horizontal Jonny pulls out of his box of tricks on "Paranoid Android" tonight are just jaw-dropping, a textured riot of detuned madness that forces the music's ante up, the wood and wire and amp reborn as springboard, not a shackle. "Bulletproof" and "Planet Telex" then almost seem like mere run-on-the-mill, state-of-the-art, "Subterranean Homesick Alien" flooded with seizured strobes to keep us on edge, Thom taking the keyboards for a much-needed sit down. "Nice Dream" is as precarious and vulnerable and moving as stadium rock can get, then Thom ditches his guitar and grabs the mic to spit, "Here's some karaoke nonsense for the indie fans." The opening bars of "C***p" roll out, Cardiff goes apeshit, then, brutally, brilliantly, it's cut dead by Yorke sneering "Ahhh, f*** that." Faces fall, before "Bones" hits them with a full-pelt bite that's breathtaking. And they just keep coming at us: "Lucky" is just incredible, still the best thing they've ever done, the chorus finding new tear ducts every time it breaks. By now, we're devastated, barely able to register a bruising, demented "Once" ripping through us. And then they're gone.
After a five-minute, deafening roar which splits ears for good, they re-emerge, but the encores, perversely, seek to send us out tranquil. First "The Tourist", then a hushed, spectral "Let Down" and a "Climbing Up The Walls" so dub-heavy and bugged-out on buzz it's gloriously sickening. The lighter-aloft cornballness of "Street Spirit" would've suited me fine as a finale; as it is, Radiohead are not gonna be let out of Wales alive unless they do "C***p". They come back and oblige, but, hysteria aside, it's the weakest thing they do all night, not so much because it limits them, but because with their current reach and scope they can't help but reduce it to novelty. Crucially, the spectacle of seeing 5,000 people sing, "I wish I was special" can't compete with seeing them sing "A heart that's full up like a landfill/A job that slowly kills you" like it's the only gospel these times deserve.
A staggering night, a staggering band, a migraine of a gig that you'll never shake. Time to get ill.
-Neil Kulkarni Melody Laker
22.11.97