Mojo - The Music Magazine

Radiohead
Victoria Park, London
Tuesday, June 24

My notes say "peerless" and it's hard to know what to add. Radiohead currently occupy the - admittedly uncontested - throne of "World's Biggest Art Rock Band", and surely there has never been a festival-sized rock show so awash with psychological complexity and musical detail (at least, one that hasn’t involved The Who).

This being Radiohead's proprietary show (tonight, there's meagre, but feisty support from Bat For Lashes) they can do what they like, and that means most of the In Rainbows album and only sporadic recourse to time-tested crowd-pleasers. So rare, in fact, are excursions into The Bends and OK Computer, that tracks from Amnesiac and Hail To The Thief are greeted like old friends.

It's testament to Radiohead's skill that the In Rainbows songs a) already sound so bedded-in and b) go places that the recorded versions only hint at. A mix that wrings every nuance from Thom Yorke's voice certainly helps; the fact that multi-instrumental prodigy Jonny Greenwood appears to reinvent his parts entirely for every show can't harm either. Bodysnatchers - which MOJO first heard at Radiohead's Hammersmith Apollo show in May 2006 - is now a savage beast, the gnarliest rock song in their quiver, and All I Need (Jonny Greenwood on vibraphone; Thom Yorke giving it some tone clusters on the old joanna) a thing of delicate, love-torn wonder. Meanwhile, the Durutti Column-indebted Arpeggi/Weird Fishes has acquired even more layers, and the soulful Reckoner a doomy dub coating and a Dr Who-ish theremin warble, confirming the impression given by Thom and Jonny's recent cover of The Rip (see below) that the band may have been listening to an awful lot of Portishead. Meanwhile, the back-catalogue picks eschew the obvious. Thus, from OK Computer we get not Paranoid Android but Climbing Up The Walls, and from Amnesiac, an utterly transformed Dollars & Cents, surfing a typically serpentine Colin Greenwood/Phil Selway groove into a synchromesh of Ed O'Brien and supertrebly guitar hits.

If there's a price for these perambulations down roads less travelled, it's paid by the fans who have come to hear the anthems, and there's an audible element of relief in the joyful roars that greet The Bends' Just and Planet Telex, the latter afforded a crushing rendering. At the same time, the sheer number of setup changes - piano on, piano off, new guitars, whatever - makes momentum-maintenance an issue. And while nerds like myself may delight in Jonny Greenwood's new toy - a machine that samples talk radio broadcasts and fucks them all up - others must be reminded of the bit in Spinal Tap when Nigel Tufnel's wireless jack starts picking up military transmissions, and wonder when Radiohead are going to play Fake Plastic Trees (clue: they're not, at least not tonight).

Indeed, even by Radiohead's standards, there is something wilfully perverse about a final encore that starts with Cymbal Rush (from Yorke's solo album, The Eraser), that proceeds into the woozy, jazz-tinged taunt of You And Whose Army? (Yorke's good eye leers into his "piano cam"; on the big screen it's like a malevolent bailiff staring through the spyhole in a council flat front door) and ends with Kid A's jerky, neurotic Idioteque. (NB. This is certainly the complaint made to me by one disgruntled, half-cut geezer as we shuffled toward the tube: "Is it just me, or was that just really shit?")

But you don't do things the hard way and expect universal plaudits. For all their apparent engagement with the outside world - at one point, Yorke leads the crowd in a half-hearted chant of "Free Tibet!" - Radiohead appear to exist in a bubble. While they remain there, ever so slightly autistically deaf to their audience's demands, their music has integrity. Like Russian gas or Saudi oil, the value of that will only increase in the troubled years to come.

Tellingly, on the eve of the release of Kid A, Thom Yorke told Bono that Radiohead were giving up rock. Bono rubbed his hands with glee, concluding that U2 now had the marketplace to themselves. But what's the point - you may ask - in being The King of a Land Of Shit, while Radiohead sail away to better places, as yet undiscovered?

By Danny Eccleston

The Setlist

15 Step
Bodysnatchers
All I Need
The National Anthem
Pyramid Song
Nude
Arpeggi/Weird Fishes
The Gloaming
Dollars And Cents
Faust Arp
There There
Just
Climbing Up The Walls
Reckoner
Everything In Its Right Place
How To Disappear Completely
Jigsaw Falling Into Place

Encore 1

Videotape
Airbag
Bangers & Mash
Planet Telex
The Tourist

Encore 2

Cymbal Rush
You And Whose Army?
Idioteque

Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood cover Portishead's The Rip

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