Graham Reid | | 3 min read
Just as the internet giveth, so it taketh away.
It isn't uncommon for concert-goers to look up an artist's setlist before a show but, in my opinion, that takes away the element of surprise.
Big acts doing stadia shows are dependent on co-ordinated lighting and effects, and those crouching guys in black who run on carrying another guitar. So the set list on the tour won't change much. If you know it in advance . . . there goes some of the magic.
To the best of my knowledge I've never looked up a set list before a show and very rarely afterwards.
So going to see a solo show by Radiohead's Thom Yorke was therefore filled with anticipation. Hard to know what he might play.
Anything to declare?
Yes, although I've listened to a swag of Radiohead (The Bends has long been an Essential Elsewhere Album), the ones I haven't returned to often are OK Computer and Kid A. I'm a fan of In Rainbows though.
Yorke's solo work has been interesting – as The Eraser, but the soundtracks especially – but The Smile (his band with Jonny Greenwood and drummer Tom Skinner) has been my go-to point. Three cracking albums.
So what might Yorke excavate from that vast back-catalogue?
I suppose you could look it up in advance but just letting the unexpected happen before your eyes and ears was thrilling because of this show's unpredictability and diversity.
Yorke – who seems to have borrowed Keith Urban's hairstyle – was an opaque stage presence: he didn't say much and his image rarely appeared on the flickering screens behind him. When it did it was pixillated into abstraction.
This wasn't a concert about personality but about the music, and in that regard it was extraordinary for how he shifted direction and took the enormously appreciative audience with him: That “we love you” woman was there as always, the guy two rows behind me twice leapt to his feet with “I fuckin' LOVE this song”.
Radiohead's Everything in It's Right Place was greeted with huge applause and was one of those songs which clearly meant something deeply personal to a lot of people.
Depending on when you dropped in it was a piano recital, singer-songwriter acoustic folk (Fake Plastic Trees), wall-shaking beats for a dance club or sky-cries psychedelic guitar rock (Reckoner).
Back in the Game had an understated, bluesy menace and – as he did all night – he sold it through subtle hand gestures as if drawing out the sound into the air around us.
And at one point, bowed low over some arcane looking piece of technology while the booming beats repeated, he brought the sound of an industrial lathe into the wide-screen noise.
This was experimental art music pulled into a rock context.
As happens when you have that much technology there were a few glitches but Yorke shrugged them off and the machines' reluctance to perform added an amusing human quality.
What was also notable was when he got to work on the loops, rhythms and electronica – he barely moved from a two-metre square spot centre-stage between the hardware – just how much of electronic history he channeled: industrial scale rhythms, nods to Eighties synth-pop, Kraftwerk and the German motorik tradition (Packed Like Sardines), a lot of Steve Reich/Philip Glass minimalism and repetition (sometimes rendered maximalist), Sixties astral-flight prog and back through the sound of cheap video games and even the whimsical blip-pop of Norman McLaren soundtracks (on The Eraser's Cymbal Rush).
And somehow this all made sense as Yorke – that singular high voice conveying heartbreak or celebration in the twist of a phrase, as on The Smile's elegant Pana-Vision – held attention on lovely material like All I Need, the intense acoustic energy of The Clock or, through delays and echoes, let his vocals become part of the sonic texture and hang in the air.
And that sound – more correctly all those sounds – are going to linger in the head for a very long time.
An outstanding, unpredictable one man performance.
He plays again tonight (tickets still available I believe) and it was the kind of show you could happily sit through again. If I wasn't going out . . .
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Thom Yorke, Spark Arena, Auckland. October 25, 2024
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Elsewhere tries to take a different approach to reviewing live concerts, often looking at the bigger picture or wider context rather just a setlist recount of the show.
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