Radiohead

Manchester Evening News Arena, Saturday 22nd November 2003

Set List: There There; 2 + 2 = 5, Lucky; Myxomatosis; Where I end You Begin; Backdrifts; fake Plastic Trees; Paranoid Android; Sail To The Moon; I Might Be Wrong; Climbing The Walls; My Iron Lung; Sit Down, Stand Up; Scatterbrain; National Anthem; Exit Music; Idioteque; The Gloaming; Go To Sleep; The Bends; Street Spirit; A Wolf At The Door; Karma Police; Everything In It’s Place.

Back in the big arenas after this tours various warm up shows and the last major tours use of big top circus tents. Radiohead may have found the perfect place to deliver to the music they are now performing; the sparse electronica that can sound a little cold and digitised on record, but in this sort of arena bounces around this vastness of the place.

The energetic Asian Dub Foundation, are the tour band of choice for Radiohead. They are a band with a similar message to deliver though from a slightly different direction. There set is one that goes down well with tonight’s audience.

At 9 o’clock sharp the lights dim and the band emerge to electronic white noise. The band launches into in my opinion the single of the year ‘There There’. On record this is a fantastic 5-minute experience – live it is something else, with Guitarist’s Ed O’Brien and Jonny Greenwood pound away thrashing out tribal rhythms at two drums. Before grabbing the guitars to take the song to a different level altogether.

One song in and you wonder how they follow that? Instead of relying on the sure fire crowd pleasers, Radiohead explore the more avant-garde output of their last three albums. The reaction from the crowd to these songs is fairly good. You get the feeling that majority of the crowd haven’t just come to see if they’ll play ‘Creep’ (which they don’t) but that they’ll give the rest of the bands output a listen.

The set draws heavily from the politicised last album ‘Hail To The Thief’. As well as from the other electronic based ‘Kid A’ and ‘Amnesiac’.

The other albums are not neglected though. ‘Fake Plastic Trees’ is given a great reception at its start as to did songs like ‘My Iron Lung’ and ‘Paranoid Android’ a song that just gets better every time that you hear it.

Front man Thom Yorke doesn’t go much on the between song banter but he has something of magnetic personality about him that keeps the crowd enthralled. He was a bundle of nervous energy as he spins around the stage like a whirring dervish. While the band solidly concentrate on getting the sound across.
It was an astonishing performance from a band very much at the top of their game. Tonight was very much the end of phase one as a band what with the soon to expire record contract. Here’s hoping that the next phase is as exciting and varied as the last.