Q Magazine:
One saturday morning at the end of April, an innocuous brown envelope landed on the doormat of a handful of UK-based Radiohead fans. Inside was a charcoal piece of A5 card, with some abstract artwork at the top and a sinister message at the bottom that read: “Sing the song of sixpence that goes/Burn the witch/We know where you live.” It wasn’t signed, but in the bottom right-hand corner a cartoon bear’s head had been imprinted, a symbol recognisable to Radiohead’s dedicated followers as the nearest thing the band have to a logo.
This old-school communiqué sent fans into speculative overload. Excited recipients shared pictures online, practically every music site in the world published a story about it and BBC 6 Music ran a news piece speaking to those in possession of one. It had been over five years since the last Radiohead album and this was the beginning of a flurry of activity, like a long-dormant volcano firing out a few sparks before the eruption. Over the course of the next week, the band’s website and social media accounts were deleted before being reawakened with two mesmerising new tracks. The urgent, orchestral stabs of Burn The Witch came first, followed by the beautifully unhurried Daydreaming. Finally, on Sunday, 8 May at 7pm, just as Springwatch ended and Antiques Road Trip began, Radiohead’s ninth album A Moon Shaped Pool was released. It turned a regular Sunday night into a worldwide listening party as fans posted reactions and theories on Twitter. Nine years after pioneering the “surprise release” method with their record In Rainbows, Radiohead had created another musical event. They still mattered.
Monday, 23 May. It is a mild evening in Paris. Torrential rain has given way to light cloud cover and now, as thousands of fans excitedly flood into the Parc de la Villette, the sun is breaking through. Tonight Radiohead play at Le Zénith, a 6300-capacity venue sitting at the top right-hand corner of the park. It’s the third date of a scattered world tour to support A Moon Shaped Pool. By the time the dates wrap up in Austin, Texas in mid-October, Radiohead will have played a total of 26 shows spread across five months. Four years after their last tour, Thom Yorke, Jonny and Colin Greenwood, Ed O’Brien and Phil Selway seem to be easing themselves back into the job of being one of the world’s biggest bands.
In the lobby of Le Zénith, fans are crowded around the merch stand admiring its varied goods. Money is handed over for bespoke Radiohead sweatshirts, T-shirts and hoodies, an embroidered notebook, a tote bag, a vinyl slipmat, a postcard collection, various patches, a scarf and a customised water bottle. Inside the main arena, elation is in the air as the lights dim at 9pm. A spoken-word recording of Nina Simone saying, “I’ll tell you what freedom is to me, no fear!” can be heard as Radiohead enter the stage and break into Burn The Witch, its urgent strings replaced by warped guitars and the thumping groove of two drummers. The first five songs of the gig follow the tracklisting of the new record. It makes for a slowly arresting opening that culminates in the throbbing motorik beat of Ful Stop, where Yorke goads the crowd with his mini keyboard like a drunk entertainer at a children’s party.
From thereon in, the setlist weaves between old classics, new-ish classics and the odd song that isn’t a classic but feels like one – tonight is one of those rare, wonderful shows where everything that’s played feels like something special. On this kind of form, Radiohead are just a level above everything else. They veer from the drum’n’bass frenzy of Idioteque to the rustic folk of Desert Island Disk to the twisted rock bend of My Iron Lung and make it all sound like pages torn from the same book. Momentum builds and builds: Yorke, who is wearing leather trousers, giggles at the exhilarated, arena-wide shriek that greets No Surprises and the crowd sing every word, turning a stark and sombre hymn into a universal anthem.
After 22 songs, they return for a second encore and play Creep for the first time in seven years. Before Yorke has even sung a word, people are hugging and crying and generally treating it less like a band playing one of their old songs and more like someone they love has been resurrected from the dead. It feels like a gift – Radiohead saying, “We’re having a really good time, so here’s Creep!” It’s such a triumphant, emotional moment that you half expect the security men at the front to turn towards the stage and go, “Mon dieu! They’re fucking playing Creep!”
After that, they play Pyramid Song and one of the best Radiohead shows in recent memory comes to a close. The crowd snake out of the venue, dazed and delirious as they walk back through Parc de la Villette. In an upstairs room behind the stage that possibly played host to a continental buffet earlier in the day, an aftershow party commences. In the corner is a cool box filled with bottles of Heineken and Leffe. The small gathering is soundtracked by a playlist of Radiohead influences that are acceptable to play at a party: Can’s Vitamin C and DJ Shadow’s Building Steam With A Grain Of Salt are played, Autechre is not.
One by one, band members join the festivities, soaking up the congratulations from family and friends. Ed O’Brien is a looming genial presence and has the sort of easy-going air that makes you think he would be good at defusing arguments, or making you forget what you were arguing about in the first place. “Tonight was really good fun,” he says. O’Brien says that Radiohead are feeling very relaxed at the moment. It’s in stark contrast to the last time they played at Le Zénith on the OK Computer tour in 1997. He remembers it as a time “when everything is new and you’re just expanding. We were riding a wave and it was all a bit, ‘Oh my God!’. Of course, we were a little dark in those days, which added to the spice!” he says.
The 1998 documentary Meeting People Is Easy captured the band during that period. On the scale of fun jobs, it made being in Radiohead look like somewhere between being a raw sewage worker with no protective clothing and Azealia Banks’s social media manager. Thom Yorke was presented as a man with the weight of the world, and possibly a few other worlds too, on his shoulders. But that was almost two decades ago, and tonight the singer chats away with an affable, anything-goes vibe about him, more chilled-out Pilates instructor than tortured frontman. He has learned to enjoy it all. “The first half was like, ‘Ow!’ and then we all warmed up,” he says of tonight’s gig. “The second half was amazing and the encores were great. You know what’s so weird is that depending on what we choose to play, it can go in all these different ways, like choosing to play Creep or choosing No Surprises.”
Yorke says that the idea to play Creep came up two nights ago in Amsterdam when someone in the crowd spent the majority of the gig shouting for it. “I kind of wound him up by starting to play it,” says Yorke, “which was a bad idea as it was like lighting a fire.” The band decided they would perform it during the encore only for their crew to veto it because they weren’t prepared. But the idea had been planted – Creep was back on the rota. “We just said, ‘Let’s see what the reaction is, just to see how it feels’.”
There’s lots of that with Radiohead – seeing how things feel. “Like we played No Surprises just to see if it feels alright,” he says. “Songs go into phases where they don’t feel right and then they come back. No Surprises was out for ages. We didn’t play it once on the whole of The King Of Limbs tour.” Yorke says that a song such as No Surprises has to be played in a certain way for it to work. “If you play it right, it is fucking dark,” he says. “But it’s like acting. It’s on the edge of totally hamming it up but you’re not. It’s just the words are so dark. When we play it, we have to play it so slow. It only sounds good if it’s really fragile.” He references the orchestral drummers for library music in the ’60s and ’70s, players who had what he calls an “artificial swing”, and some Scott Walker recordings. “Sometimes the drummer in Scott Walker sounds like he’s gonna fall off his chair.”
In a few days, Radiohead will head to London for three Roundhouse shows that act as a UK homecoming. Yorke says that playing in the UK is “always a little bit difficult” for him but that “it’s just a mind thing now... this time I’m not really bothered.” When Q tells him that everyone is really excited about the new album, he says, “Yeah, well hopefully that will carry us through.” He lets out a cackle at the idea of parents rushing through their kids’ bedtime routines so they could listen to the album at its 7pm release time. Yorke didn’t expect their return to be greeted with such hysteria. He wondered if people would care, given how long it had been since The King Of Limbs. “We expected the opposite,” he says. “I cherish the band, but I don’t expect anyone else to.” There were times when he wasn’t sure if there would ever be another Radiohead LP, but he says that he thinks that every time.
The singer is keenly aware that the five years between The King Of Limbs and A Moon Shaped Pool is the longest ever gap between Radiohead albums. “There are reasons for that,” he says. Last summer, Yorke released a statement to say that he and his partner Rachel Owens had amicably separated after “23 highly creative and happy years”. It is impossible to listen to the new album without thinking that the break-up is at the heart of some of these songs. Tracks that had been knocking around for a few years as live versions are now delivered with a new melancholic depth: in particular, True Love Waits (first performed on The Bends tour in 1995) and Present Tense (a relative newcomer, debuted by Yorke at a show in 2009) both resonate as two of Yorke’s most beautifully personal vocal performances.
Yorke’s favourite song from A Moon Shaped Pool is Daydreaming, “when we do it right”. “Tonight was a little bit sketchy, it’s usually better than that,” he says. The song came quite early in the process at La Fabrique studios in France, where the bulk of A Moon Shaped Pool was recorded. “It was a breakthrough,” says Yorke. “It was the equivalent of when we did Everything In Its Right Place [ the opener on 2000’s Kid A ]. We got that and then we were, ‘Right, OK, this is it...’” Yorke says that when he suggested doing Daydreaming – a six-minute song with no chorus or drums – so early in the live set, the band’s co-manager Chris Hufford asked, “Are you fucking mad?!” But Yorke said it seemed like the best solution. “We couldn’t figure out, ‘How do we bring people in?’ And there’s a portion of people who have heard it, so that’s alright.”
Yorke heads across the room to say hello to a friend just as Tigger-ish bassist Colin Greenwood comes into view. All of the band seem to have enjoyed tonight’s show – guitarist Jonny Greenwood and drummer Phil Selway are chatting away elsewhere at the party – but it’s the bassist who is beaming the most. “Thom was just amazing!” he says. “It was going a bit wrong at the beginning but he really pulled me and everyone together.” Greenwood says that everything around the new record is “happening in a lovely way. We’re very happy.”
Greenwood recalls that Eddie Izzard came along the last time they played Le Zénith in 1997. “Bloody hell,” he says to himself, “we haven’t been here for ages.” There’s an infectious bounce to him as he does a quick run-through of his favourite Paris venues. “The Bercy is nice,” he says, “have you ever been there? It’s an indoor arena, and of course Le Bataclan. We once played a theatre here and Diana Ross came to the show. It was mental! We had to call her Madame Ross. I think the venue was called Café de la Danse.”
Just as Greenwood is about to go on the search for more beers, he’s informed by Radiohead’s press officer that Kate Bush will be present at their Roundhouse show in London later in the week. “Ah, no pressure then! Kate is great,” he says, adding that he recently gave her a tour of Radiohead’s Oxfordshire studio. Half an hour later, the aftershow is winding down. Outside the back of the venue, O’Brien and Hufford are climbing into people carriers to head back to the band’s hotel. The night’s work is done. Radiohead will be back here within 24 hours for another sold-out show.
A few days later, the band play the first show of a three-night residency at London’s Roundhouse. It’s the must-have ticket in the capital. A huge queue stretches along Chalk Farm Road and ticketless fans desperately hold placards asking for spares. The frenzied anticipation is matched by another euphoric performance, the setlist again bridging all eras of their back catalogue. The crowd is a broad mix, stretching from those who can boast that they saw the band play to five people and a dog back in the day to those who can boast that they weren’t born when OK Computer was released. The audience receive final song Paranoid Android like it’s a baptismal dunk in the water and Yorke revels in the balcony-shaking crowd reaction at the end. After some waves and bows, Radiohead exit the stage. It hasn’t always been easy, but right now Thom Yorke is cherishing this. Everything is in its right place, and exactly as it should be.
