The Radiohead shows Thom Yorke hated playing: “Terrible”
The touring lifestyle isn’t for everyone. It might be fun trying to spend time with your friends making the greatest music possible in the studio, but the idea of someone travelling to one hotel after another and then having to shuffle through a mob of people just to have a moment’s peace is bound to wear on them after a while. Thom Yorke already had his fill of the stadium circuit by the time Radiohead released OK Computer, but even when they made a sharp turn to a new genre, the tour for Kid A was anything but ideal for him.
While Radiohead were among the most popular bands in the world at the end of the 1990s, they hardly liked the idea of being famous. Being respected by the community may have felt good at the time, but it hardly mattered when everyone and their mother looked at them less like performers and more like meat whenever they made their way to the stage.
In fact, it felt more like a self-fulfilling prophecy when looking at the image created with OK Computer since the message of a dystopian society ruled by technology had a rollout that gave in to the most robotic parts of modern living. Whether they liked it or not, Radiohead were now the 1990s answer to U2, and Yorke would do everything in his power to change it.
Relying solely on rhyme and glitchy soundscapes, Kid A was the moment Radiohead became a completely different entity. There were still guitars, to be sure, but they were used more to colour the sound as the group started making more ambient takes on rock and roll, like on ‘Idioteque’ and ‘Treefingers’.
Once the group took to the road to perform the songs, though, Yorke thought that the first shows were an absolute train wreck, telling The New York Times, “I saw footage of us playing one of the early Kid A shows in the tents that we used for live shows at that time. It was freezing cold, and the sound was terrible. We put everything up against us but came out fighting. We played a ten-minute version of ‘The National Anthem’, and it’s completely insane. You can tell we felt as if everyone was turning on us.”
Then again, can you really blame half the audience at that point? These were the guys that were supposed to bring rock into the 2000s the right way, and now here they are putting together soundscapes that sounded like a modern version of Kraftwerk mixed with bits and pieces of Aphex Twin, with hardly an acoustic guitar in sight outside of one buried in the mix on ‘How To Disappear Completely’.
This kind of move should have broken the group, but the album became a second wind for them. Rather than cower to what the crowd wanted, Radiohead’s latest reimagination was practically them looking their audience dead in the eye and saying they make music for themselves above anyone else.
Most artists don’t have the guts to pull that kind of move, but Radiohead wasn’t just another ordinary band. If you wanted another ten versions of ‘Let Down’, look elsewhere because Yorke was more interested in unpacking his synthesiser and sequencer and throwing out every rule in the book.
