Radiohead's new avant-garde direction hasn't stopped them from being an inspiring live band. David Sinclair is relieved

Radiohead/ Clinic
Victoria Park, Hackney
London
September 23, 2000

There's just no pleasing some people. Indeed, for some people, not being pleased is a professional calling. Take the intriguing case of Thom Yorke and Radiohead. Not only did their last album, OK Computer, sell more than 4.5 million copies, it has also generated the kind of acclaim rarely achieved since the heyday of the Beatles. Yorke is now rich, successful, respected and adored. But has this made him happy?

Of course not. In fact he has become even more displeased with the world in general, and his lot in particular, which is a perfectly logical response when you think about it, given that the day he stops feeling displeased will be the day that Radiohead's goose stops laying the golden eggs.

But it seems that there is only so much beautiful music to be drawn from the wellspring of existentialist misery that continues to fuel Yorke's muse, and for Radiohead's new album, Kid A, released on October 2, the group has produced a collage of strange and unresolved musical abstractions which owe more to the influence of the electronic avant garde than to the guitar-band tradition in which they have previously operated.

On Saturday night, at the first of three London shows in the group's custom-built Big Top - a 10,000-capacity tent which set a new (non-festival) benchmark for audience discomfort - there was a constant trade-off between the songs the audience wanted to hear and this baffling new material which the group clearly wanted to play.

To begin with, as Jon Greenwood coaxed odd noises from a keyboard instead of his guitar, Phil Selway did his best to imitate the fidgety snare patterns of a drum machine and Yorke howled and moaned various dislocated vocal phrases in constantly recurring sequences, there was an uneasy suspicion that this was all we were going to get. Then, like the beam of a lighthouse glimpsed through the fog, the opening chords of "Lucky" emerged from the melée, followed by a majestic version of "My Iron Lung", and the familiar magnificence was recaptured.

This turned out to be the pattern of the show as a whole, with tranches of new material - mysterious, rhythmic and amorphous, yet also tightly scripted and often searingly dramatic - being interspersed with favourites from the old days, including "No Surprises", "Airbag" and a magnificent performance of "Paranoid Android" with dazzling split-second lighting changes.

Yorke threw himself into the performance body and soul, and while it is easy to poke fun at his morbid worldview and the group's somewhat unhealthy fascination with its own navel, the self-belief which its members exhibited in putting across their new vision was palpable.

And by the time the finishing post was in sight, the audience was beginning to warm to the new stuff, clapping along to the implied house/disco beat of "Everything in its Right Place" while Yorke, his eyes screwed shut and head wobbling like a Thunderbirds puppet, warbled and plonked away on a keyboard.

The finale found the band vacillating between the selfparody of a new song called "Motion Picture Soundtrack", which conjured an image of how Jasper Carrott might portray a troubled, not-so-young rock star, and the gilt-edged splendour of "Karma Police" which ended with a piano outro of leisurely grandeur.

Kid A is unlikely to be judged as kindly as their previous work, but perhaps that is not the point. Suddenly, their old songs have been put into a new context, and if nothing else this was a show which renewed Radiohead's status as a work-in-progress.

The Times
26.09.00