Everything OK at Houston tour opener

Radiohead
Woodlands Amphitheater
Houston
June 18, 2001

Between the precocious headphone symphony Kid A and the decidedly understated songs of Amnesiac, Radiohead have gone to great lengths in the last couple of years to distance themselves from the melodic guitar rock they built their name upon. But in the span of two hours Monday night at the Woodlands Pavilion in Houston, the maiden performance of their first tour on U.S. soil in more than three years, they re-embraced it with an intensity only slightly less brazen than U2's current self-proclaimed campaign to reapply for the job of the best rock band in the world.

"I'm bored with the whole rock thing, aren't you?" droned frontman Thom Yorke in an interview last year. Either he's had a change of heart, it was all just a put-on, or - true to Amnesiac's title - he's forgotten about all that. With or without a guitar strapped around his neck, Yorke looked anything but tired of even the basest rock conventions as he led the band through a twenty-two-song set that not only revisited the finest moments of 1995's guitar-driven The Bends and 1997's prog rock opus OK Computer, but also transformed brooding Kid A and Amnesiac fare like "Morning Bell" and "Knives Out" into full-blown anthems.

Yorke's enthusiasm frequently bordered on boyish and grew in intensity as the night wore on. When the sold-out crowd at the open-air amphitheater erupted into a roar of recognition at the opening strains of "My Iron Lung" four songs into the set, Yorke smiled and pumped his fist in the air in an excitable "raise the roof" gesture. During the first encore, as he sat at a piano with his back to the audience to sing Amnesiac's "You and Whose Army?," he stopped several times to look over his shoulder, grin mischievously and wave his arm for a response. During "Bones," from The Bends, he strutted from one side of the stage to other striking poses reminiscent of U2's Bono. "Is it loud enough for ya?" he asked amiably after "Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box," a song he began with a brief aside about traffic jams in England. "You don't have those here, do you?" he asked the Texas crowd. "You do? But you have so much space - can't you just off-road?"

But for all of Yorke's stage charm and visible good humor, the music remained the evening's true revelation. The Bends and OK Computer selections received the most fervent reactions, particularly the epic "Paranoid Android," "Karma Police" and show-closing "The Bends" (sung by Yorke in the style of Johnny Rotten), but the energy generated from those only enhanced the Amnesiac songs with a newfound majesty. Propelled by Ed O'Brien's driving rhythm guitar and punctuated by dramatic squawks of lead work by Jonny Greenwood, "I Might Be Wrong" surged with intensity. Yorke rose to the occasion, his eerily beautiful voice tapping a melodic vein in the chorus only hinted at on the album. The more experimental Kid A material fared even better. Although the opening "The National Anthem" lacked the tumultuous, jazzy kicker of the album version, the band had no problem recreating Kid A's multitude of electronic effects, thanks to Greenwood's synthesizer and arsenal of other assorted gizmos, including a transistor radio and a sampler he used to capture and manipulate Yorke's voice during "Everything in Its Right Place." Near the end of the song, Yorke turned his mike on the crowd, and a second later Greenwood was weaving the sampled applause in and out of the mix.

The band's crowning achievement, however, was the pulsating Kid A stand-out, "Idioteque." Kicked along by Phil Selway's mechanically precise drum beat, the song was performed completely sans guitar, with Greenwood and O'Brien hunched over effects boxes, bassist Colin Greenwood manning a synthesizer and Yorke delivering his most frenzied vocal of the evening, his body jerking spastically as though wracked with volts of electricity on every beat. A minute after the song ended, he was still wired; as the applause winded down and roadies set up his piano for "Everything in Its Right Place," Yorke looked out over the crowd like a conquerer and spontaneously snarled "Idioteque"'s lyric, "Ice age coming!/Ice age coming!" a capella for a fresh roar of approval.

It was an electrifying moment in an evening full of them. However far astray Yorke and Co.'s collective muse may take them in the future, performances like this will prove that they've yet to run out of ways to inspire with - and just as importantly, be inspired by - rock. Whatever they come up with in the studio, in a live setting, everything with Radiohead is in its right place.

-Rishard Skanse

RollingStone.com
19.06.01