I’m not the type to have a bucket list, but if I did you can bet “see Radiohead live” would be on it. As of last night, I can scratch that from said (non-existent) list.
Radiohead played at Riverbend Music Center last night in what is the first show, to my memory, they’ve ever played in Cincinnati. I’m not entirely sure about that because I haven’t always been as appreciative of Radiohead as I am presently. I’d listened to OK Computer & Kid A for years but it wasn’t until In Rainbows—a record forever intertwined with my two weeks abroad in England and all the gloom, bus rides across English countryside, sight seeing, and aimless wandering on London city streets that trip entailed—that I finally got what they were doing as a band. That record clicked with me in a way the others hadn’t up to that point, as such, I consider it “my” Radiohead album.
In those subsequent five years since In Rainbows’s release and my trip to Radiohead’s homeland, they haven’t come anywhere near Cincinnati. So when a work colleague informed me they were going to play here this summer, you can imagine how giddy I became at the chance to finally see them. When tickets went on sale on W.A.S.T.E. there was a hair-pulling, gut-wrenching twenty minutes trying to battle the overloaded site to get a ticket before all the good ones were gone but fortunately I prevailed (and on an iPhone no less).
Fast forward to last night, as I’m with Paige watching Caribou rave it up on stage (quite good, by the way) and it still hadn’t set in I was moments away from seeing one of my favorite bands of all time. When curtain finally dropped from their wall of lights and Radiohead walked on to the stage, clapping and smiling, it at last became reality.
What happened in the 23-ish songs they played during the course of their set and two encores (here’s the setlist) must be witnessed first-hand to truly appreciate but I did come away with a few impressions any Radiohead fan aching to see them live can get amped about.
To begin with, they sound exactly like they do on their albums. I know it seems impossible (I could hardly believe it), especially with oddities like “Feral” or “Kid A”, but with the exception of a few horns missing here and there, it was dead on. And their stage show? Easily the most impressive I’ve seen, with a wall of light behind the band displaying a different reactive pattern as Radiohead made their way through the set. Dozens of monitors, both fixed and suspended overhead, hovered around the stage, some of them rotating and altering the stage landscape, each with a camera focused on individual members of the band with effects corresponding to the light show. Needless to say it was epic.
As for the setlist, the selection was very much in support of their newest album, The King of Limbs. All but one song (“Little By Little”) was performed from that album in addition to three recent singles from their website (“These Are My Twisted Words”, “The Daily Mail”, & “Staircase”) and a new, unrecorded song (“Identikit”). Nothing from Pablo Honey or The Bends and none of the ballads or sing-alongs (Paige was bummed by the absence of “Karma Police”). The King of Limbs is my least favorite album after Pablo Honey and tied with Hail to the Thief (neither are particularly memorable) but I will say Radiohead gave me a newfound admiration for a lot of TKOL’s tracks. The band regularly hit a groove throughout the show and tracks I found slow and ethereal (in a bad way) on the album (“Separator”, “Lotus Flower”) were funky and muscular in a live setting.
Also, Thom Yorke loves to dance. Dancing, pre-“Lotus Flower”, is not the sort of thing I associate with a band like Radiohead so it was fascinating to see a fresh dynamic introduced to such familiar music. And given the added emphasis and rhythm, even on the less rhythmic studio tracks, I’m eagerly anticipating how this influence their future output.
Was it the best live show I’ve ever seen? Hard to say. I’m still recovering from my trance-like state of amazement. Time will tell, of course, but it’s safe to say I’ll remember it the rest of my life.
