Radiohead’s Yorke gets lost in solo sounds
Hunched over a bank of electronic gadgets, Thom Yorke determinedly twists knobs, punches buttons and occasionally shimmies behind a handheld microphone while swiping strands of greasy hair out of his face. He occasionally looks up or strangles a few notes out of a nearby guitar, but he never speaks.
This is how he likes to spend time off from his day job as the singer of Radiohead.
Performing a rare solo set Thursday, Dec. 14, at the Fox Theater in Oakland, Yorke, 49, appeared blissfully lost in the synthetic gurgles and rib-tickling dance music beats that enveloped his lanky silhouette through the late-night two-hour set.
Yorke is in the middle of a very brief tour of the states, accompanied by longtime producer Nigel Godrich and the Dutch audiovisual artist Tarik Barri. The trio played at the Fonda Theatre in Los Angeles on Tuesday, Dec. 12, and are also scheduled to appear in a larger setting at this year’s Day for Night festival in Houston on Sunday, Dec. 17.
If Yorke is feeling the sting of Radiohead’s snub by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — in its first year of eligibility, the maverick British band lost out to poodle-haired soft rockers Bon Jovi, Dire Straits and the Moody Blues — he doesn’t show it.
Wearing matching black T-shirts and facial scruff, Yorke and his collaborators stood tethered to three waist-level podiums that spilled over with laptops and various other instruments.
While Barri provided a slightly psychedelic visual display that evokes vintage Windows 98 screen savers (and caused at least two seizures in the crowd), Yorke and Godrich laid out a soundtrack anchored in heavy bass and barely there falsetto vocals.
The singer creeped around the stage, shuffling his feet, throwing his shoulders back and flailing his arms about like a baby bird about to take flight for the first time.
Yes, he was dancing like nobody was watching, and it was as mesmerizing as it was hilarious.
The set list, which included a handful of new songs like “I Am a Very Rude Person” and “Two Feet Off the Ground,” was shapeless and dark. It was hard to shake the suspicion that most of the material was being made up on the spot.
Like much of his solo work (plus the mishmash of tunes he has written for Rag & Bone fashion shows), they sounded like half-baked demos for more full-bodied Radiohead songs.
The live dates are ostensibly in support of a reissue of Yorke’s 2014 solo album, “Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes.” Last month, he also dumped his previous releases — 2006’s “The Eraser,” and Atoms for Peace’s 2013 release “Amok” — on Spotify, the music streaming service he once called “the last desperate fart of a dying corpse.” So there’s that too. Midway through the show on Thursday, just before midnight, a few disappointed fans started a stream of their own as they moved toward the exits when it became abundantly clear that Yorke wasn’t going to throw in a surprise campfire singalong of “Karma Police.”
But he and his companions were too caught up in the rapture to notice — and after 20 years of turning rock music on its head (beginning with 1997’s “OK Computer,” for those keeping score) if there’s one thing Yorke deserves, it’s a moment of sheer self-indulgence.