Earnest, soulful sort of sound and vision experience

MUSIC

Thom Yorke

Usher Hall, Edinburgh

RADIOHEAD frontman Thom Yorke’s name may be above the titles on this tour but his latest live outing is a threeway collaboration with his longtime wingman, producer Nigel Godrich, with whom he plays in side project Atoms For Peace, and visual artist Tarik Barri, who creates in-themoment digital action painting across five large screens.

Meanwhile opening act Oliver Coates, a contemporary classical cellist with whom Yorke and Godrich collaborated on the most recent Radiohead album, A Moon Shaped Pool, had to make do with the dim glow of a couple of LED poles to light his brooding but at times stormy suite of strident, distorted drones and keening, mournful melodies, mixed through with vocal and other samples and loops. This set the earnest but cathartic tone to follow. Barri was first on to the stage, metaphorical paintbrush in hand, taking his place behind one of the clinical consoles in a sparse stage laboratory set-up which implied that important work was being done here. But the show began soulfully enough with undulating electric piano and Yorke’s plaintive voice floating over the echoey lament of Interfere.

Maybe it was the grand Usher Hall setting but what followed chimed as the kind of credible yet accessible performance which would happily have found a home in the International Festival’s contemporary music programme had the timing been right.

With one exception, the set comprised a seamless suite of tracks from across Yorke’s solo albums, plus a handful of newer songs introduced over the last couple of years. The glitchy beats, lean funk guitars