When you are the voice of one of the world’s biggest bands it is inevitable that the spectre of your ‘day job’ will be scurrying around in the shadows. It does not matter how hard you try to escape or outrun said ghoul, it is there, grimacing and grinding, rubbing up on your monitors.
Pulsing through the strobes.
It will be there in the preface, the brackets and all the inverted commas.
And so it is that, despite featuring just two fifths of Radiohead (Greenwood is an Oscar-nominated composer) and a quarter of Sons Of Kemet, The Smile sounds just like...well, Radiohead.
It’s there on Yorke’s solo albums The Eraser, Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes and Anima, in fact, the only time Yorke has not sounded so inescapably Yorke-like was on the soundtrack to the mind-melting remake of Suspiria, where he actively tried to NOT to be constrained by ‘himself’.
So, after not a small amount of media hyperbole and hyperventilating, this short, sharp run of gigs (ahead of a just announced wider tour,including a stop at the Abbaye Neumunster in June) these live(streamed) shows were being touted as a VERY BIG THING. Quite how that affects you depends on your credentials as a fan of artist and or band.
Throughout my teens and later years there have been two distinct camps of Radiohead fans, those being the utterly devoted and those that can summon a ‘meh’ so large it could be heard from space.
Isabella Eastwood has a whole other view of the show in her review here.
This, for want of a better word, is a counterpart to that opinion. Much in the way that The Smile is to Radiohead. They exist in the same universe but operate as separate yet connected entities.
The trio take to the stage to the doomy William Blake poem from which they took their name and find themselves in a lighted cage. Think neon-budgies, or a gig Deckard would take a replicant to.
As Pana-Vision begins its intro, you feel it could easily be from Hail To The Thief. The Smoke is another such track that harks back to the earlier, read middle, catalogue of one of the world’s biggest bands.
Does it sound a million miles from anything from King Of Limbs or A Moon Shaped Pool...no it does not, but we are on safe ground.
During Speech Bubbles the band misstep and with nowt but a smile and a grimace they ‘second chorus’ it.
We Don’t Know What Tomorrow brings visits Amnesia era nostalgia and throughout there are jazzy tones, drum fills and some noodling with knobs and dials.
Musos are in a lather about Jonny Greenwood plucking a lyre and tinkling the ivories...at. the. same. time. As if they were not already aware of the musical dexterity he possesses.
The reason I avoid getting into deep convos with a Radiohead fan is that I hope to dodge the nausey, know it all, glibness of it all. I fear that I have missed a clever-clever time signature, or a lyric reference to obscure literature.
I don’t think I am smart enough to really GET Radiohead. My favourite track is still Street Spirit, I murder it in the shower from time to time. So when Yorke sings “Don’t bore us, get to the chorus,” on Open the Floodgates it is delivered without irony, on a track that has no chorus. The irony not being lost is perhaps Yorke’s greatest joke.
Thin Thing and the chugging You Will Never Work In Television are standouts, as are The Smoke and Free In The Knowledge but they could be ‘Head offcuts. It gives full to the fire that all is not well in the wider band and Yorke does seem ‘happy’ in the way that Yorke does.
Skinner is a versatile drummer and his percussion adds a layer of excitement that is missing from the often razor sharp and laser guided productions of the full band productions. How these collections will fare open are is a tough call, as there are cuts that waft around and smack of pretension. The Same and The Opposite are two such examples.
The interesting yet listless Just Eyes and Mouth trails into a faithful run through of Joe Jackson’s 1979 hit ‘It’s Different For Girls’, and then the show ends.
It’s neither the full blown spectacle many had thought, nor the genre-smashing art, that some had suggested.
We are living through strange times and it remains to be seen if these types of hybrid performances are really going to redefine the way we consume live music.
For the moment, I am not sold. However, having not yet had chance to see Radiohead live, I will happily take feeling involved with something, anything that provides connection, be that digital or otherwise and I cannot wait for the show in the summer air.
The Smile played:
