Tours do not come out of nowhere, but this one was stealthy.
Radiohead are back.
These dates dropped in September, and it soon became clear that getting tickets might be even harder than it was last time. I had made my peace with not going. Sort of. However, through the magic of old friends, email that looked a little bit suss and backchannels shared with a nod and a wink, I was able to sort it.
Tickets bought, app downloaded, train booked, hotel secured. It didn’t feel real yet. On Sunday evening, another email headed Novemeber (sic) 24… “Dear You… Radiohead is delighted to invite you to the gathering…” so there would be an aftershow. Someone had remembered us.
In Rainbows fit the first section of my train journey and feels like the last record that truly stuck. I thank my past self for booking cheap First Class seats, and it feels like the day is off to an auspicious start.
After a slight wobbler on the Thameslink platform, as I can’t check into my hotel until 3pm, I decide to go straight to The Dome.
At North Greenwich, I cash in a free tea and cake at the Costa outside and wander in to find Ya & Yam. The whole complex, the former Millennium Dome, is mind-blowingly large and like the sleeve of OK Computer come to life. A theme park of a shopping centre, full of chain restaurants, outlet shops and cafes. I find Y & Y in the gate E queue. They have secured a good spot, but can come out for a break. We adjourn to a picnic table by the indoor skydiving concession, and I drink my tea. Eating my home-made sandwich feels like a radical gesture in these surroundings. They are both distracted by monitoring the AXS app for the possibility of more tickets (Yoko, whom I have not met before, needs one).
They were at the shows in Madrid, but not in Bologna. The band are getting tighter. Coming to a show mid-way through the run was a good move. I ask them if the array on stage is the same as the diagram sent to me by a friend who was here on Saturday night. We have diagrams. As they both have O2 phones, we can queue to get priority wristbands – I wait around until 2.30pm, and we fetch up at the special door to talk the O2 guy into giving me a wristband too. The O2 system is a source of great anxiety to the queuers, and they get bands whether they use them or not. The first 100 people will be allowed into a special bar at 6 and allowed into the venue as soon as the doors open. They have a good spot in the queue tonight, so will go in that way, but they like having the option…
I marvel again at the size of the place.
I’m starting to get The Yips, so take a bus back to my hotel to regroup. By the time I head out again, it’s dark, and I get stuck in traffic. Lisa, my plus-one, sensibly got a hotel one tube stop away, so is already waiting for me when I get back. Sitting on a bus in traffic replicated some of my more mundane gig-anxiety dreams, but I arrive just after 5pm. The Yips have taken hold.
I have half a pint, gabble my excuses and can only manage the last handful of her chips. Eating now feels like a bad idea. We figure out where all the various box offices are, and as we round the corner to go outside, the blind goes up in the aftershow window. Wristbands and instructions secured, we fly back inside, just as my Scottish pals reach the head of the Merch queue next door. I hug them and sweep back inside. A word with the O2 man gets Lisa into the bar, and we are away.
Jeff Buckley playing in the background, I order drinks but have no memory whatever of paying for them. A guitar and vocal duo are firing up, but that is the last thing I want right now. There will be no support, and that feels appropriate. I am resistant to any kind of queue, and thankfully, this has worked out well. There’s an element of deja vu, even though I haven’t been to many gigs lately. Music is still part of me, I just find it’s less present. I don’t have space for much new stuff. I don’t have patience for as many shows.
I’m inside. The corridors are huge, and it is still quiet. I dodge into the area following a girl who “had already been in” and bypass the tape marking a path to the main floor. The main queue has already come in; the stage is 4 or 5 rows deep already. I go to where I thought I wanted to be, but I can’t work out which way round my diagram is meant to be. There is a tambourine on the mic stand. Ed? All respect to Ed, but I don’t want to stand here. I can’t really deal with this right now. I manage to communicate with Ya and find my way to the same sight line they are on (they’re at the front and I’m about 7 rows back). Sense memory has taken hold.
I’m somewhere between Thom’s mic and Jonny’s basecamp. I communicate this to Lisa via some photos, and she is soon there too. Two blokes are wondering if this was a cage-fighting cage, which member would be the hardest? “Yorke’s a scrapper, but Selway has the muscle.”
There are some very young kids in front, in “what the hell are they wearing?” outfits. Are those your knickers, love? Are you sure about that tutu?
Parents in technical anoraks stand at the edge of the arena looking like they just released their teenager into the fray. Lisa goes for beer, and we settle in, sitting on the floor, which calms me down slightly.
Ray (my Scottish pal) and his crew are behind us. The mix tape is eclectic but consistent (Syd Barrett, just like in 1994). It becomes more instrumental and weirder, adding to a looming tension in the room, which gradually increases, the lights subtly dimming as we build up to stage time. People stand up. There is the occasional roadie visible behind the Wall of Death.
At 8.30 pm,the band file on stage, emerging from a hole in the stage. I’m no longer quite sure if I am connected to my body.
Planet Telex rumbles into being, and muscle memory kicks in. Somehow, I have a surge of energy for 2+2 and Sit Down Stand Up. The set has structure, straight into Lucky – gasp.
No time to breathe. At some point, Thom speaks, but doesn’t say much. Was that an Old Man Steptoe voice? But he’s into it, and when the others are in view, they are smiling.
They are loose, literally in the case of Thom’s baggy carpenter jeans. It might have been Kid A that set me off, but it was No Surprises that broke the dam, and it segued into Videotape, just to make sure the emotional impact was felt, a killer run into Arpeggi, which felt like the moment where the machine was well and truly working.
Idioteque is almost gone before I’ve even found the rhythm, then Everything In Its Right Place with a little bit of Bjork’s Unravel felt like I’d looped back about 20 years. It pushed the buttons.
Bloom offered a breather, required because The National Anthem thundered in its wake. Let Down was greeted like a hit, like maybe it was their best song, and for once, it sounds like the best it has ever sounded, and they have worked out how to play it, but there is no way to tell how it has been done.
Climbing Up The Walls pulls me up and bursts through. Bodysnatchers shakes it off. There are waves from the band as they go back down the hole in the middle of the stage. We place bets on Fake Plastic Trees being the encore and it is. Lisa props me up.
Has Jigsaw been the needle drop on a TV show? It is greeted like a hit and sung along to by the younger element. From this angle, Paranoid Android is all about Jonny’s stop-start guitar, Thom being on the other side of the stage, sharing the presence. All I Need gives me time to notice how much my feet are hurting, the first time I’ve been in my body all night. The glorious simplicity of You And Whose Army, and the now familiar nose-cam with a red Thom floating above Jonny and Colin.
But then, like it’s for me, Just, and I shriek at the bit that always makes me shriek, and I’m 20-odd again, and this is the best band in the world, and they are my band, maybe just for this moment, but they are still my band. The half-life of this feeling has decayed, but it’s still there somewhere in the radioactive core.
Karma Police is a gutsy singalong, but not beery and rowdy, heartfelt and honest. “For a minute there, I lost myself” Because they know now, are confident of it, they trust it, they are lost in it too.
Surely, transcendent is too hyperbolic a term, but for most of these two hours, the immersion has been total, save for noticing a bloke too out of it to cope with staying upright, a few spilt drinks and a moment to look around and see that hardly anyone in the place was still in their seat. Realising that almost everyone else is feeling something like it too.
I let Lisa, queen of ligging, find where we need to be. Bog, bar, sit down and maintain.
It’s a big room somewhere up in the gods. No warm Red Stripe here. Everyone looks neat enough to make me believe they have spent the whole show sitting down. Friends, Family, assorted hangers-on hanging out. But there is a sense that you’re only here if you’re a fan.
A sweep of the room confirms that Phil is the only member here. We have a drink and wait for him to have a window. I spot Duncan, Jonny’s guitar tech; he hasn’t changed a bit, but he won’t remember me. I spot Nick Banks from Pulp, looking more weathered close up, and someone who might be Mark Watson (or maybe just has comedians’ hair). At the bar, a chap is bewailing the price of the beer, and as he turns to pass us, I realise who he is. “Are you Lee?” I ask, “How do you know me?” he’s well refreshed. I shake his hand and tell the actor Lee Ross where I know him from, and my inner 15-year-old, who wanted to be Lynda Day, is thrilled to meet her best friend Kenny… If you know, you know. Turns out he’s a massive R fan, he has the stunned look of someone who “gets it”. He wanders off.
Lisa spots an opening, and we wander closer to Phil, who is being given the 10-minute warning by the tour manager.
He says “Hiya” and gives us hugs in turn. Phil is the diplomat, but he is sincere. I ask him to give that hug to the others. He says the in-the-round set up is working; they like being able to see the audience reaction. They’re getting into it. Something like that. My brain and my face aren’t quite connected anymore. See you later, he says. Nice jumper says Lisa – Phil is wearing the fluffy gradient jumper he wore in the Sunday Times spread a few weeks ago. It’s shedding like mad, says Phil. We examine our clothes for fluff.
We call it a night. Down in the vast and deserted hall, we test the echo with a couple of “for a minute there’s”.
Lisa goes for the last tube, I find a bus stop and get some air. Some Welsh chaps who seem quite lost turn out to have come on last-minute corporate VIP tickets and are demonstrably overwhelmed. Even the casual attendees have felt it.
The bus runs out of road about a mile before I get to my hotel (roadworks). I order an Uber because its cold, my feet are protesting and the last thing I want to be is really lost.
