Radiohead
London Astoria September 3, 1997
Talk about perfect timing. In 1997, with Radiohead on the crest of their two best albums – The Bends and OK Computer – I befriended a member of the band’s W.A.S.T.E fanclub, who plusoned me into a secret gig identified only by the queue of miserabilists snaking down Charing Cross Road.
Radiohead killed it. I remember Airbag’s stop-start skitter, still not quite believing my luck. The tear-up at the end of My Iron Lung. The surge of bodies and baking air when those four brittle chords lit the fuse of Just. The release-valve outro of The Bends, Jonny Greenwood tearing at his Telecaster like a psychopath plucking a chicken. They didn’t need Creep any more, instead throwing us cork-sniffers a couple of cult-hero b-sides, in Talk Show Host and Banana Co. Admittedly, I don’t remember them covering Carly Simon’s flouncy Bond theme Nobody Does It Better – twice – but the internet insists that it happened.
Almost nothing from that night exists now, with the Astoria having been torn down in 2009 to make way for a Crossrail stationery cupboard, and Radiohead heading left-field to make a series of bleep-bloop albums that left me increasingly cold. But on that night they were my own personal storm cloud.