Masters of reinvention
Radiohead/
Asian Dub Foundation
Evening
News Arena
Manchester
November
22, 2003
When I heard 'Everything in its Right Place', the opening track from Radiohead's Kid A album, for the first time on its release in 2000, I remember thinking: this is intriguing, lovely, different, but it's not exactly chart-topping stuff. And as the rest of the album - the hotly anticipated follow-up to their globe-conquering OK Computer - unfolded, it occurred to me that a group who had the world at their feet were committing commercial suicide by releasing music that was so radically different from anything they, or for that matter anyone else, had ever done before. And how, I wondered, would they ever do it live?
In fact, Kid A went on to top the album charts, the band have subsequently released two more highly successful albums of envelope-pushing music, and on the opening night of their sold-out tour of UK arenas, the newer material was in many cases more exciting and more rewarding than stuff from the "classic" Radiohead era.
Take, for instance, a song called 'The National Anthem' from their Amnesiac album. It doesn't have verses and choruses. It doesn't have much of a tune. What it does have is a juddering five-note riff-cum-groove which is utterly simple and quite sensational, over the top of which Thom Yorke's voice drifts like a lost spectre. And here the crowd welcomed it with a cheer that was every bit as rousing as the one they gave for a song from the old Radiohead canon, 'The Bends'.
In Radiohead's brave new world, hitherto unexplored musical elements such as repetition and incrementalism have replaced the old paradigms. Sometimes, as on the sensational, clattering 'Sit Down, Stand Up', from this year's Hail to the Thief album, the effect was purely visceral; sometimes, it was deeply emotional, such as on the opening song, 'There There', with its portentous drum pattern and burgeoning guitars. I've heard them play it three times this year, and each time it has brought tears to my eyes.
There's also plenty of old material in this two-hour show: among them the glorious 'Lucky', a soaring 'Karma Police' and 'Fake Plastic Trees', and a sublime 'Street Spirit (Fade Out)'.
And what did they end the show with? Something from the old days? Not a bit of it. At the last, Yorke - once a statuesque performer, but now constantly mobile and jumpy - had the arena clapping in unison to the dreamy electric piano motif of 'Everything in its Right Place'. They are, simply, the masters of reinvention.
David Cheal