Radiohead rocked roughly 5,000 pairs of socks Monday night as they passed through Boston for a two-night stint at the Pavilion. Offering “Climbing Up the Walls” as the opening song for the show allowed the band to really set the mood for the night. The group’s front man, Thom Yorke, pierced the hearts and souls of everyone in attendance, as his shrill voice sang out the haunting message: “open up your skull, I’ll be there.”
As they played the final notes to the opener of the night’s mind-melt, they went into several new songs titled “Bangers ‘n’ Mash” and “15 Step,” tunes which are still being tweaked and warped for their next album. Radiohead is a band that has used touring to build on the new material they’re actively recording, and accordingly, the night before, Yorke conveyed this message to a sold-out crowd, “If we didn’t have any new songs, we’d be home right now.”
What stood out the most about the night’s performance was the degree to which Yorke’s stage presence has changed. On previous tours, he has performed under the visual parallel of an ant under a magnifying lens, disintegrating under the watchful eye of his audience. But with time, Yorke’s discomfort with his fame, himself, and the expectations of his fans, has disintegrated as well. He actively displayed a sense of warmth towards the crowd that he has avoided in the past.
As Jonny Greenwood and Ed O’Brien ditched their guitars for their own pair of Tom Toms, the group ripped into “There There,” a single off their 2003 release, Hail To The Thief. Following the choice selection, Greenwood manned a gigantic synthesizer that could easily have been mistaken for an ancestor of R2D2 while Yorke segued into the opening piano riff of “Everything in its Right Place.” As the packed house tried to clap along to the tune’s bizarre rhythms, Yorke walked away from his piano/vocal duties to encourage crowd participation, while Greenwood maimed and manipulated a sample he recorded of Yorke’s voice with an effects setup that dwarfed the technology at NORAD.
When Yorke thanked Massachusetts native Willy Mason for his opening set, he refused to succumb to using the name of the city as a means of working up the audience. Avoiding standard front-man draw-in tactics, Yorke worked the crowd into a frenzy with nothing but a calculated glare and the tease of delivering a message to his fans. Coincidentally, they capped the night off with a song that closes 1997’s Ok Computer, “The Tourist.”
Their established material was obviously what elicited the strongest crowd response, but the enthusiasm fans exhibited towards unreleased material was considerably high. As a whole, Radiohead captivated their audience from start to finish with a set that offered more unheard material than was offered off any of their established albums. They left out their epic, “Paranoid Android” and the self-loathing anthem, “Creep.”
The group showed their fans and critics that they can get by just fine with a set of unfamiliar material, and more importantly, that their fans embrace everything unknown that their favorite band has to offer. Their set-list spoke to the fact that they consistently disregard popular demand, and that they stand by this policy. It’s a Dylan-goes-electric-esque policy of artistic integrity, that new material isn’t just another shot at top-40 radio.
All in all, the new material was good enough to justify the hype behind their new album, and the amount of time they’re spending making it. So as their original summer deadline for the new album passes, all that stands to be told is when they’re going to be able to get the thing on the shelves.
Photos by Scott Fleishman
