THOM YORKE
Usher hall, Edinburgh, June 8, 2018 Jigsaws falling into place: Radiohead man’s agile electronica
IN February, Thom Yorke began posting random phrases and sentences on Twitter: “putting rocks in our hearts”; “pierced by long nails/by coloured windmills”; “I’m in a room full of robots”. To his 1.03 million followers, this surely meant a new album was due, although Yorke’s past form with this sort of behaviour tells us that it may not arrive in the form we expect. Regardless, his current solo tour at least allows him the chance to let off some steam before Radiohead’s next round of tour dates. One suspects that the 2,000-capacity Usher Hall offers a more intimate setting than, say, the four nights they have booked at Madison Square Garden in July. Here, at least, Yorke could reach out and touch the audience – if only he could just stop fidgeting for a moment. One minute he’s hunched over one of the laptops or keyboards dotted on smart white plinths around the stage; the next he’s chopping out chords on his white Telecaster; the next he’s doing his early-’90s car park rave dance. Such is the nature of this set – presented almost as a continuous mix – there is little opportunity for between-song chatter.
While eyes may be on the fluid, agile Yorke, there is strong work being done elsewhere on stage. He is joined by longtime
producer Nigel Godrich as well as Dutch visual artist Tarik Barri. Godrich does much of the musical heavy lifting, moving from laptop to bass to guitar, while Barri’s high-end visuals are projected onto five huge, rectangular panels positioned behind the trio. His images are beautifully rendered accompaniments to the music: the mysterious geometric shapes from the PolyFauna app spiralling effortlessly through the tech-funk of “Black Swan”, or the black ink spilling across the screens during the expansive “Two Feet Off The Ground”. At one point, what look like alien Polo mints glide through an infinite digital landscape. The swirling vortex that accompanies “Impossible Knots” astonishingly recalls the opening credits for Jon Pertwee-era Doctor Who.
The set is largely drawn from The Eraser and Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes, along with
New song “The Axe” carries a familiar air of melancholy and unease
a smattering of Atoms For Peace songs and others Yorke has performed live down the years. The earliest of these, “Twist”, surfaced in 2011 on a DJ mix he compiled for XFM, while more recent additions include “I Am A Very Rude Person” and “Two Feet Off The Ground” from late last year. There is one genuinely new song, “The Axe”, which Yorke debuted in Florence at the start of this run of dates. Built around keys and pulsing beats, it carries a familiar air of deep melancholy and unease: “Goddamn machinery, why won’t it speak to me?” sings Yorke. “One day I’m going to take an axe to it.”
Considering Yorke/Radiohead’s long history of writing songs and having them around unrecorded for years, it’s hard to tell if these songs might form the rump of a new LP. As it stands, there is something deeply satisfying about the way these new(ish) songs sit next to the established material, their sequence subtly reinforced by the tone of the music – from the fierce drum’n’bass of “Impossible Knots” to the itchy ambient flow of “Black Swan” to the skittering loops of “I Am A Very Rude Person”.
In a way, this is business as usual from Yorke. The songs help pay tribute to some of Yorke’s early electronic influences – the slow-moving melodic tones of Autechre, the wonky synths of Burial and old-school jungle of Origin Unknown (“Felt that I was in this long dark tunnel”, indeed). The evening ends, though, with Yorke alone at a piano, under a panoply of stars, giving us a stunning – and unexpected – version of Radiohead’s “Glass Eyes”. Not for the first the time, it sees Yorke ending an evening of lovely, clever, involving music with the unshowiest kind of resolution.