Last week a Radiohead-head friend offered me a ticket for the last of their run of shows at London’s O2 Arena. The poor, deluded fool had paid several hundred quid and was looking to recoup. I politely declined, saying I would rather suffer from decompression sickness. My friend was not amused – but then that’s Radiohead fans for you; liking the band is a serious business.
The band is currently on a mega tour of Europe and the reviews have been mixed. Some fans complain about the relentless flashing imagery, while others have pointed out that hanging gauze curtains around a circular stage might not be the best way to feel close to your heroes. Not that they’d be missing much. I mean, you’d hardly describe Radiohead as flamboyant showmen. These nice, privately educated chaps prefer the rock-in-trade uniformity of grey shirts and matching grey flannels. Freddie Mercury they are not.
I find the fad for rock understatement both a contradiction in terms and annoying. Rock stars don’t like to be seen to be making an effort. They want us to believe they are just like us – but much, much cooler. But it’s been going on now for decades, well before Radiohead shuffled into our collective consciousness back in the early 1990s. I’m sorry, but black jeans and a dirty T-shirt just look as if you can’t be arsed, which in turn feels like an insult to audiences – especially ones that have shelled out a thousand quid or more for a single ticket. My friend got off lightly.
If you’re going to put on a show then, for heaven’s sake, put on a show. Make an effort, be bold, go mad, surprise us, throw some real money at the problem. Heritage rock bands like Radiohead could start by swapping out the inevitable bank of epilepsy-inducing video screens for some actual 3D fun. I’m talking polystyrene Stonehenge replicas (life-sized ones) and humanoid space pods à la Spinal Tap.
Radiohead like to compare themselves to Pink Floyd, and while it’s true that those polite Cambridge boys weren’t exactly Jumpin’ Jack Flash on stage, they made up for their English diffidence by going overboard with the pyrotechnics. The gay abandon of 1970s artists such as Kiss and Queen is sorely missed. These were rock bands in the truest sense – with witty, over-the-top frontmen who knew how to delight and hold an audience. They had real flair, especially in the trouser department, often with silver sequinned stars sewn into the flaps. Thom Yorke (why not just plain Tom?) and his cohort of hunched introverts look as though they’ve just crawled out of their fetid boarding-school beds. Startled-fairy-faced guitarist Jonny Greenwood somehow manages to look both bored and off his face on pixie juice, while Thom seems desperate for a pee most of the time.
Yorke may be pushing 60 but he still sounds like a whiny, bedwetting misfit hiding out in his mum’s Oxfordshire basement
Radiohead are just a bunch of Eighties shoegazers – they formed in 1985 – who seem much more suited to tiny, smoke-filled back rooms crowded with awkward, trench-coated youths. And while their live shows have been dividing audiences, it’s their music I still struggle with. To me it all sounds like something the most annoyingly pretentious public-school nerd might come up with if you gave him an out-of-tune guitar and some kitchen utensils and told him to make an album. Frenetically monotone, brain-fryingly repetitive and with lyrics verging on nonsense, I find much of their output the aural equivalent of a stinky student bedsit.
And yet for hordes of men in their fifties – and yes, it’s mainly middle-aged blokes – Radiohead are the greatest rock band of all time. Like I say, I’ve tried hard to understand the appeal, and now that everyone’s talking about them again I’ve even been giving the albums another spin. I’m sorry to say I just can’t get past Yorke’s earnestness and the Greenwood brothers’ discordant electronics that dominate albums such as Kid A, The King of Limbs and Amnesiac. Yorke may be pushing 60 but he still sounds like a whiny, bedwetting misfit hiding out in his mum’s Oxfordshire basement.
I’m beginning to wonder whether the band really were that cool. If coolness means being in thrall to obtuse discordance, then give me Coldplay – Radiohead’s unhip cousins – any day. While much of Coldplay’s material comes from the same monotonous playbook as Radiohead, at least they don’t take themselves seriously any more. Like Yorke, privately educated Chris Martin is in the throes of middle age – but unlike Radiohead’s miserable frontman he still appears to be having fun. And his band certainly knows how to put on a humdinger of a show.
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