Radiohead fans fumble sombre moment
Radiohead, with Junun K (out of 4) At Scotiabank Arena, Thursday, July 19.
Amemo to the people of Toronto on the correct protocol to be observed during a moment of silence: be silent.
Just for a moment. It’s called “a moment of silence” and not an “hour of silence” for a reason. Pretty easy. The concept is well within the grasp of your average 3-year-old. Yet when Thom Yorke and the rest of the members of Radiohead finally acknowledged the elephant in the room at the Scotiabank Arena at the end of a markedly sombre, but riveting and deep, two-hour-plus set on Thursday evening and asked that the 20,000 or so fans be quiet for a moment to honour the memory of their former drum tech, Scott Johnson — who perished when a faulty stage collapsed in on him just a couple of hours before the Oxford quintet’s scheduled Toronto performance at Downsview Park on June 16, 2012 — we blew it. We blew it.
“Six years ago, we wanted to do a show in Toronto. The stage collapsed, killing one of our colleagues and friends,” said Yorke, who’d otherwise barely uttered more than a “thank you” or two to the room between tunes all night long, at the close of what turned out to be an eight-song double encore. “The people who should be held accountable are not being held accountable … The silence is f---ing deafening.”
Yorke’s subsequent efforts to impose a respectful silence on the rink were, however, largely frustrated — first by the usual idiots who feel compelled to fill every second of reflection or peaceful dead air at every show with feral “WOOOOOOs” and “WE LOVE YOUs,” then by misguided guardians of decency yelling “Shut up!” at them and, finally, by others who thought they might rescue the situation by screaming things like “Justice!” and “Scott Johnson!” and … well, you get it. It was a mess.
May there be a special place in hell reserved for the chap who let loose with a disgusted “This is a rock show!” in the middle of it all, too.
Anyway, the rousing singalong of “Karma Police” that followed was only more satisfying if one considered it directed at such insensitive clods as well as the corporate entities who’ve so far failed to acknowledge any part at all in the mishap that claimed Scott Johnson’s life at 33. The band’s crew and Johnson’s still-grieving parents in England — all of whom have watched two separate criminal trials stem- ming from the Downsview incident fizzle out — have, thus, never received any sort of closure on a disaster that conceivably could have killed the entire band if it had happened later that day.
So we’re lucky that Radiohead finally came back. Thursday’s performance — the band’s first here since 2008 — didn’t quite provoke the awed gasps, delirious giggles and tears that flowed so readily then, when Radiohead was easily the finest live band of its stature on the planet, but that’s mainly because its repertoire has grown subtler and trickier and less instantly gratifying since then.
Thursday’s set list definitely felt keyed down in observance of the dark context. Radiohead is not Van Halen, obviously, so this was never going to be an evening of party jams, but it was, for the most part, a grim and gloomy affair, even by Radiohead standards. On the To- ronto-specific tour T-shirts for sale in the merch stands, the Grim Reaper featured prominently.
The three openers, “Daydreaming” and “Ful Stop” (both from 2016’s slow-to-grow A Moon Shaped Pool) and Hail to the Thief’s “Myxomatosis” established the stylistic parameters generally observed for the rest of the night: ambient/elegiac piano-led balladry, brooding/gliding post-punk menace and tangled/mangled experimentalism drawing upon brainy jazz and abstract electronica.
There were few “hits,” per se, although those tunes that at least fit the description based on crowd response — Amnesiac’s bleak “Like Spinning Plates,” OK Computer’s weary “No Surprises,” and The Bends’ “Street Spirit (Fade Out),” for instance — tended to fall into those categories.
What the entire program had in common was a lack of release. When Radiohead chose to “rock out” last night, it did so in clenched fashion, not really lettin’ ’er rip until Yorke threw his hands up and coaxed an enormous roar from the crowd on the way into the uncharacteristically bug-eyed last third of “2 + 2 = 5” in the first encore.
Reward did eventually, decisively arrive in the form of Kid A’s tingly “Everything In Its Right Place” — which indeed came in exactly the right place, coupled with the most lysergic barrage yet of the evening’s many drool-worthy digital lighting and video effects — at the top of the second encore, followed by the bizarro-rave hysterics of that same album’s beloved “Idioteque.” This is still a band in a class by itself.
You already know what happened next.