Radiohead at Madison Square Garden

Thom Yorke

In 1985, several schoolmates formed a band called On a Friday in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, England. The name On a Friday referred to the band's usual rehearsal day in the school's music room. The music teacher introduced the boys to jazz, film scores, postwar avant-garde music, and 20th-century classical music, all of which influenced what would become the band's eclectic sound. Upon securing a recording contract, the band became Radiohead, the name taken from the Talking Heads' song "Radio Head." Radiohead went on to sell more than 30 million albums worldwide. The band consists of its original members, Thom Yorke (vocals, guitar, piano, keyboards), brothers Jonny Greenwood (lead guitar, keyboards, other instruments) and Colin Greenwood (bass), Ed O'Brien (guitar, backing vocals) and Philip Selway (drums, percussion). After nine studio albums, Radiohead released OK Computer OKNOTOK 1997 2017 on June 23, 2017, a 20th-anniversary remastered version of its best-known album, OK Computer, with bonus B-sides and previously unreleased tracks.

Radiohead sold out four nights in one week at Madison Square Garden, and tonight on the debut of the series, with the addition of touring percussionist Clive Deamer, the repertoire looked back on the band's entire career, not just OK Computer. Although the choices were not necessarily obscure tracks, they also were not a deliberate "greatest hits" package either -- the band rarely performs "Creep" anyway. Overall, the two-hour-plus concert was a very mellow avant garde art-rock performance with flourishes of ambient jazz and progressive rock soundscapes, punctuated periodically with a more punchy alternative rocker. Arrangements strayed from familiar standard practices, making them more heady and somber. Blindfolded, listeners might say that meaty chunks of the instrumentals were not even rock music. The magic, hence, was in the manner in which the band captured the listeners' imagination and steered them through both dense riffs and ethereal atmospheres. Radiohead succeeded in delicately balancing the mainstream and the abstract on a tightrope that was as comfortably safe as it was intriguingly risky.

Visit Radiohead at www.radiohead.com.

Setlist:

1. Daydreaming
2. Ful Stop
3. Myxomatosis
4. Morning Bell
5. Optimistic
6. Kid A
7. Decks Dark
8. Pyramid Song
9. Let Down
10. Bloom
11. The Numbers
12. How to Disappear Completely
13. Reckoner
14. Lotus Flower
15. Paranoid Android
16. Idioteque
17. Nude

Encore 1

1. Present Tense
2. Weird Fishes/Arpeggi
3. The Gloaming
4. Bodysnatchers
5. The Tourist

Encore 2

1. You and Whose Army?
2. No Surprises
3. The Bends