A spaceship has landed in the middle of the O2 Arena. Radiohead’s dodecagonal stage is enclosed on all sides by tall screens that periodically flash brightly while emitting deep, quizzical synth tones. The fans lucky enough to snag tickets for this first of four London shows – they probably could have sold out another 14 – throng eagerly around this extra-terrestrial craft, waiting excitedly for it to open up and reveal its crew of homesick aliens and paranoid androids.
When the band eventually start popping up sheepishly through a trapdoor in the stage like reluctant gameshow contestants, it feels faintly anticlimactic. But then you remember that Radiohead are the band who make the ordinary extraordinary. They achieve transcendence not via star power or virtuosity – though they are all brilliant musicians, as rapidly demonstrated tonight – but via the brutal honesty of their songs, and a dedication to always delivering something new and good and meaningful. They were never going to come back half-arsed, and this show is as thoughtfully staged and sincerely performed as you would expect.
There is a trade-off, however. Putting the stage in the middle of the arena inevitably compromises the sound, because all the speakers are pointing in different directions. Swirling opener “Planet Telex” ought to engulf the audience, but with the band still behind those semi-transparent screens, it feels oddly constrained.
When the screens lift midway through the following “2+2=5” – a tribute, perhaps, to the O2’s Kafkaesque entry process – it elicits a roar of relief that makes the upside of playing in the round immediately clear: the vast arena feels much more intimate, and with each band-member facing a different portion of the audience, they all take greater personal responsibility for rousing the crowd. Ed O’Brien is particularly effusive, mostly by pointing his guitar skyward but also when theatrically walloping his stand-up drumkit on a gripping “There There”.
Jonny Greenwood ensures that each sclerotic solo is an event; and even his brother Colin gives a knowing salute before unleashing the pummelling bassline of “The National Anthem”.
Thom Yorke, meanwhile, generously divides his time between opposite ends of stage, sometimes dancing his way all around its perimeter, at first in a silent-movie shuffle, gradually becoming more animated during a mesmerising “15 Step” before really going for it on a delirious “Idioteque”, suggesting that, all along, Radiohead’s much-vaunted embrace of avant-garde electronics was essentially just Yorke’s attempt to make tunes he could dance to.
The absence of new material is not an issue, given how far ahead of the curve most of these songs were anyway. In fact, they barely play anything from their two most recent albums, which is a shame for fans of glitchy jazz Radiohead, though they are clearly outnumbered tonight. In any case, “Sit Down. Stand Up.”, with its frenetic synth-blurp coda and terrifying refrain of “We can wipe you out any time” could have been written this week, while watching footage of Donald Trump and Mohammed bin Salman grinning like cartoon villains in front of a wall of gold.
But Radiohead are rarely as gloomy or heavy as reputation suggests, and many of their best songs feel fabulously weightless. Somewhere along the line, “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi” has become a lithe, shimmying crowdpleaser, while “Kid A”, aired for only the second time on this tour, is an eerie, spectral wonder.
A few songs sound a little rough around the edges – “Everything In Its Right Place” loses some of its awe-inspiring oddness in this slightly giddy rendition, with Yorke instigating an awkward clap-along – but after two weeks of tinkering in Madrid and Bologna, Radiohead seem to have finally alighted on the optimum set list.
Presumably they’ll continue to switch it up to keep themselves interested, but it does make a lot of sense to shunt the most egregiously anthemic songs – “Fake Plastic Trees”, “Let Down”, all the ones that had Coldplay furiously taking notes – into the encore, where everyone can wave their phones without fear of being ambushed by a sudden volley of sub-bass. Of course, the notion of what constitutes a phone-waving anthem is tested to its limits by a still-astonishing “Paranoid Android” and the prowling, pungent “A Wolf At The Door”, which Yorke in particular seems to relish unleashing at this late stage in proceedings.
After a celebratory canter through “Just” – which Yorke introduces as their shit-or-bust moment, written “on a freezing cold farm in 1994” – they end, as of course they always should, with “Karma Police”. As proved by the opportunist busker bashing through it later at London Bridge station, it’s a song that loses absolutely none of its power through misappropriation and over-familiarity. The moment, you know the one, where the chords change and 20,000 people bellow “For a minute there, I lost myself”, is quite overwhelming.
You can understand why Radiohead don’t want to be Radiohead most of the time. It’s a tough job being the conscience of the nation, while also being expected to both innovate and write all the big choruses. But it’s hard to believe they would give this up forever: it’s just too good.
SET LIST
Planet Telex
2 + 2 = 5
Sit Down. Stand Up.
Lucky
Bloom
15 Step
The Gloaming
Kid A
No Surprises
Videotape
Weird Fishes/Arpeggi
Idioteque
Everything in Its Right Place
The National Anthem
Daydreaming
Jigsaw Falling Into Place
Bodysnatchers
There There
ENCORE
Fake Plastic Trees
Let Down
Paranoid Android
You and Whose Army?
A Wolf at the Door
Just
Karma Police
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