Arriving at The O2 for the opener of Radiohead’s London residency, we’re greeted by Stanley Donwood artwork along the walkway and the words from the band’s doomy modern mantra ‘Fitter Happier’ on an imposing banner hanging from the ceiling of the former Millennium Dome. Our thoughts skip back to arriving at Oasis’ Live ‘25 tour back in the summer. This, the other big rock comeback of the year, comes with a different flavour of anticipation but no less palpable. We’ve swapped bucket hats and chucking pints into the summer sky for crawling through the frosty night to gather in gloom. Toniiiiiight, I’m a pig in a cage on antibiotics.
It’s hard to believe it’s been nine long years since Radiohead’s last album, the opulent but mournful ‘A Moon Shaped Pool’, with the band not touring since 2017. Since then, we’ve had side-projects – peaking with Ed O’Brien’s underrated solo turn as EOB and Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood almost seeming like Radiohead in all-but-name with the jagged jazz-rock of The Smile – and a dose of controversy.
After playing in Tel Aviv in 2017, scrutiny magnified over the band’s ties to Israel amid the increasing horror of the genocide in Gaza. There was some heat over Greenwood’s collab with Dudu Tassa (an Israeli musician who has performed for the IDF) and over Yorke’s follow-up statements against backlash. The guitarist himself had been on anti-government marches in Israel (the homeland of his wife), and the band recently made their stance clear by further condemning Netanyahu’s regime, arguing that they hope music can bring people of all cultures together. That’s the M.O. tonight, without a whiff of protest or boycott in the air.
The crowd surrounds the stage, set up in the round for a far more intimate and immersive experience than most corporate enormo-dome shows allow. A twitching vocoder builds and teases kick-off before the band arrive and get immediately old-school with the snotty guitar misery of ‘The Bends’ opener ‘Planet Telex’. It’s the first of many crowd-pleasing moves from a band not always known for them, as the packed-out room giddily howl back “everything is broken – why can’t you forget?”, united against the fuckery coming from all directions of society.
[embed]https://youtube.com/watch?v=HweIP50pglA&feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1[/embed]
With a “busking approach” that has seen the band rehearse over 70 songs for the tour – airing around 43 of those so far – this ain’t the repeated banger machine of Oasis’ shows, and it’s a joy to be kept guessing. It’s a setlist weighted equally heavily towards the crown jewels of ‘OK Computer’ and ‘In Rainbows’ alongside the once-maligned but now rightfully reappraised ‘Hail To The Thief’; a hit-parade (in a Radiohead way, no ‘Creep’, obviously) punctuated with occasional glammed-up curios for breathing space.
You’ve got the roaring political paranoia of ‘2+2=5’, the widescreen, bittersweet ‘Lucky’, the pumping rave of ‘15 Step’ and glorious sing-along of ‘No Surprises’ at the top of the first act. It’s an opening chapter that’s also peppered with ‘Sit Down. Stand Up’’s new subtle happy hardcore outro, ‘Bloom’ from the brittle ‘The King Of Limbs’ – now with more of a neon pulse – and ‘The Gloaming’ into ‘Kid A’, allowing the set a needed collapse before shit really gets real.
There’s no room for a toilet break from then on out. From the tender ache of ‘Videotape’, the wig-out one-two-three punch of ‘Weird Fishes/Arpeggi’ into ‘Idioteque’ and ‘Everything In Its Right Place’, to the rocky ‘In Rainbows’ cuts and an almighty first set closer of ‘There There’, it’s all a Radiohead faithful would want and it looks quite stunning, to boot.
Then come the spoils of a seven-song encore that reads on paper like fan fiction – complete with the recently-viral ‘Let Down’, a cheeky turn from “a song we wrote on a freezing cold farm in 1994” (indie beast ‘Just’) and the almighty full-stop of ‘Karma Police’. This is the cinematic, arty yin to Oasis’ hedonistic yang: that dynamic of “standing on the edge” and taking it all in. What a show: a visceral energy, a tasteful spectacle, all delivered with a generosity of spirit, Yorke in full rockstar mode as the band trade places to tend to each corner of the venue. For a band once embarrassed by the notion of ‘arena rock’, nobody does it better. A new album and another night like this can’t come soon enough.
Radiohead played:
‘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’
‘Fake Plastic Trees’
‘Let Down’
‘Paranoid Android’
‘You and Whose Army?’
‘A Wolf at the Door’
‘Just’
‘Karma Police’
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