Radiohead/ Four Tet
Olympia Theatre
Dublin
May 17, 2003

Here's some good news for all those OK Computer and The Bends addicts who fund the electronic noodlings and rattlings of Kid A and Amnesiac a little baffling. Radiohead are not just rocking again, they are rocking as nev3er before. Their new album, Hail to the Thief out on June the 9th is thoroughly guitar driven; the single released next week, "There There", a thunderous blues.

They opened their short tour in Dublin with this pounding anthem, JonnyGreenwood and Ed O'Brien drumming as well as Phil Selway, sounding like an army on the march, while Thom Yorke wailed out his cryptic warning and intuition of warning "just because you feel it/ doesn't mean it's there... we are accidents, waiting to happen"

Of the evening's 22 songs, 10 came from the new CD, four each from OK Computer, Kid A and Amnesiac, only one fourious "Just" from The Bends. But there was no need to resort to the old favourites to please the fans. From the start this was a blast. Radiohead don't go much for visual show, coming in jeans, T-shirts and trainers, but their sheer musicianship is spectacular in itself.

Even the trippier, sampled and distorted sounds from the last two albums became a convincing part of the whole live whole as they moved around their nstruments - Thom sitting at a piano mysteriously decorated with a picture of a crowned Sid James raising 2 fingers, Jonny Greenwood tuning in to his Roberts radio. Ed O'Brien kneeling among his mang key boards. Yorke, compact and ferrety, has phenomenal nervous energy, stamping, jumping, wriggling and folding himself up as if made of rubber. Over the ranging guitars, some of his vocal subleties were lost, but in the "Pyramid Song", performed as an encore, he soared into the heights.

As a finale, there was (inevitably with its mention of floating down the Liffey), the exquisite "How to disappear Completely", Yorke's falsetto rising away above hanging chords. So the band concocting such eerie, original sounds on record turn quite naturally into an astonishing, driving unit on stage.

Penderecki and The Pixies can go together. Or put it another way. Coldplay may be cute, but Radiohead are great

The Evening Standard
19.05.03