As members of The Smile, Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood came through Boston for a performance at Roadrunner on November 16th that dares longtime fans to wonder if the Oxford-based quintet is best left on the back burner.
The Smile’s approximately 90-minute set consisted primarily of music from their sole release, 2022’s A Light for Attracting Attention, as well as material Yorke said they’d been writing more recently. The Smile’s sound has been patronizingly compared to something resembling Diet Radiohead, and while that may bear truth with regards to the album, in the live setting, they’re performing with a fire in their eyes unseen since Radiohead’s 2006 Summer Tour.
Yorke has always been at his most comfortable when he’s operating outside his comfort zone and while Radiohead’s last two albums had their moments, neither are considered the kind of timeless classics that they consistently churned out starting with their sophomore release, 1995’s The Bends up until their seventh album, 2007’s In Rainbows. It has been suggested that with age, their sound had simply mellowed out a bit, but after seeing the fierce enthusiasm driving Yorke’s performance of The Smile’s material, one can’t help but wonder if Radiohead’s last two studio products were less the result of their age and more to do with boredom making music with the same five men who’ve grown up together over the past thirty years.
2000’s Kid A is arguably their best album to date and is considered by many to be one of the most important LPs of the 21st century and it’s no secret that Yorke’s relationship with his bandmates during its creation was particularly rocky. This is to say, there’s precedent showing that Yorke thrives creatively when he’s outside his safe space and this was crystal clear at Roadrunner when he and Greenwood spent the night swapping guitar, bass, and electric piano duties back and forth like they were competing for the “Most Instrumental Combinations” award.
Greenwood famously used to wear an archers arm guard to protect his forearm from the violent trashing he took to his Telecaster. But more recently, he’s made waves scoring films for Paul Thomas Anderson (earning an Oscar Nomination along the way), so seeing him break guitar strings during “Pana-Vision”, the very first song of the night, it felt like a true return to a prior form.
About two-thirds of the way through the set, Yorke came out to the front of the stage to do his trademark Spastic Dad Dance commonly executed during performances of “Idioteque,” but if ticketholders were hoping to hear a Radiohead song or two in the encore, they were out of luck. Yorke and Greenwood clearly want this project to be distinct fromtheir other band, and in light of Yorke’s comments that they would be performing newly written material, it’s fair to presume a sophomore release from The Smile is far more likely in the not-too-distant future than a tenth Radiohead album.
In an interview with The Line-Up Podcast, Radiohead guitarist Ed O’Brien raised eyebrows in a recent interview by bringing the group’s future into question, commenting that they are not currently active and have no plans in the foreseeable future. Call this blasphemy, clickbait or whatever you want, but it couldn’t be more obvious to anyone in the crowd at Roadrunner that Thom Yorke is having more fun on stage than he has since Tony Blair was occupying 10 Downing Street. Yorke recently spoke out in favor of toppling the current British government to presumably rebuild the UK’s future through a new government in Parliament. In a sense, what The Smile did on stage in Boston could be considered practicing what he’d preached.
One Response
It was boring. Your review of the concert was more about the history of Radiohead.