BY: Chris Rothweiler
Saturday, July 14th, marked the fourth and final sold out show for Radiohead at Madison Square Garden this week. Each evening a little more unique than the previous. One never knows what oldie or rarity the band might unearth on any given night. Already in Chicago during the tour’s first stop, “Blow Out”, was performed for the first time since 2008. A real treat for those in the audience as Pablo Honey era songs outside “Creep” are rarely attempted. Could we be so lucky at MSG night 4?
The band came out of the gate like a slow lumbering beast, the gentle piano and keyboards of “Daydreaming” swirling and swelling to a crescendo of Thom Yorke pledging he is “Just happy to serve………you.”. Radiohead quickly flipped the script after the Neil Young tinged “Desert Island Disk” by transforming the entire arena into a giant pulsating rave party with “Ful Stop”. That is one of the many aspects I love about this band. The diversity in style and scope between one song to the next. They keep you on your toes at all times. A sensory overload.
Highlights from the main set included a slower version of “Kid A” with drummer Phil Selway supplying a military like backbeat, the punky “2+2 = 5” with Thom spitting out pure venom, “Videotape” with a new backing keyboard by Jonny Greenwood, the rejected James Bond theme “Spectre”, and the Romeo & Juliet inspired “Exit Music (For A Film)” featuring fantastic guitar noodling by Jonny. Following this, they performed Can infused “There There”. Each time I hear it live I become more and more convinced that this tune is one of their greatest masterpieces. The guitar solo finale by Jonny was absolutely savage, playing like his hair was on fire, and making for one of my favorite moments of any Radiohead show I have ever attended. A song like this is very, very hard to top, so naturally Radiohead one-upped it by playing “Street Spirit (Fade Out)” which is an all-timer in its own right.
For me the encores at a Radiohead show are like unwrapping presents on Christmas morning. What will the band give us tonight? What jaw-dropping relic from the past or unreleased ditty could the band pull from their deep catalogue? At first the band played it straight and simple with some old faithfuls like the always incredible “Idioteque”, the Ice Storm themed “House of Cards”, the sad guitar finger plucking of “Present Tense” and the rip roaring “Bodysnatchers”. However, the real gift in the first encore was the addition of “The Tourist”. It has only been played sparingly since the year 2000 but it seems the band has fallen back in love with the song, as it has popped up on several setlists since 2017.
Encore 2 began simply with Thom strumming his acoustic guitar and Jonny recording and playing vocal loops on his laptop, as the duo launched into the somber “Give Up The Ghost”. Next, they performed “Optimistic”, one of the finer moments from Kid A, which to me deserved placement earlier in the main setlist, as it did not quite hit the mark as an encore-type song. I’d have looked towards “My Iron Lung”, “Let Down” or “Reckoner” but that’s just me. To close out the night, you knew they would either go with “Karma Police” or “Creep”, or maybe even both like the last time I caught Radiohead at the Garden in 2016. The band elected for “Karma Police” and it quickly became the biggest singalong moment of the evening. I love that when the song finishes Thom keeps strumming and lets the arena sing the chorus as the band slowly slips off stage one by one.
There have been a lot of whispers over the last few weeks that director Paul Thomas Anderson and Radiohead are secretly working on a tour documentary of this North American summer tour. I really hope that comes to fruition. It would be nice to see a spiritual successor to their previous documentary Meeting People Is Easy (1998), which showed the pain and agony of becoming one of the worlds biggest rock bands. It could serve as an important retrospective and celebration of all that Radiohead has accomplished over the last 25 years. It has truly been an extraordinary run, a run which hopefully has many more chapters to be written.