Radiohead/ Handsome Boy Modeling School
Sears Theatre
Toronto
October 17, 2000

Good popular music makes many claims on us, some blatant, many obscure. The genius of Radiohead, the British quintet that played the Air Canada Centre last night, is that it neither scorns nor entirely embraces the obvious.

The band has been much celebrated, and sometimes mocked, for its complexity, its baroquely tragic outlook, and its lofty unwillingness to pay the wages of fame. Yet the band showed no inclination, during the only Canadian concert of its three-stop North American tour, to take its audience to school.

The band's latest album, Kid A,contains plenty of material to fox the average rock listener, and the disc was well represented on last night's set-list. But so were much more classically proportioned tunes such as "No Surprises",which anyone who believes in the relentless forward march of progressive rock might have thought Radiohead would, by now, have discarded.

The band was also quite willing to dirty up its sound, to play raw and a bit ragged, and so bring its pristine musical structures a little closer to the sweat and soil that ultimately join any rock show to the primitive lure of the genre. The clamorous tangle of guitars that is such a part of "Airbag" had a degree of steel and snarl in the live version that suited the moment perfectly.

The newer material fitted smoothly into the spaces of trust created by renditions of the old. (It did not tamper substantially with its recorded arrangements.) "No Surprises" was followed by a new song, very much in the Kid A open-form mold, grounded in an upward rising bass rhythm pattern that dropped out dramatically during a climax that transformed Jon Greenwood's clotted keyboard chords into a slow rapturing into some kind of heaven.

Singer Thom Yorke held the centre of the stage like a wiry, angry puppet, waggling his head, thrashing at his guitar, occasionally slumping down at an upright piano. His fierce demeanour and high-floating tenor emphasized the dual nature of his appeal. He seems beholden equally to a tragic muse and a savage god.

Yorke maintained a running joke about the vampirism of corporate sponsorship, introducing each song with a mocking acknowledgment of some commercial entity or other. Gucci and IBM were a particularly inspired choice for "Electric Android" (sic), one of the band's most arresting numbers from its 1997 album OK Computer. It was eerie to hear this elaborate ode to alienation and tentative grace transforming itself into a cozy singalong, though few held the tune through the full rock-out sections in 7/4 time. In the end, the obvious is always more singable.

-Robert Everett-Green

Globe And Mail
18.10.00