Yorke Kidding Me!

I know I’m a bit slow on the uptake interweb-coverage-wise but I was off sick at the start of the week and have only just properly watched the footage from last weekend’s Thom Yorke gig.

I guess this blog takes a similar stance to Niall’s Luke Steele blog, who praised the man after their debut live show. Empire Of The Sun could have very easily never performed any gigs ever and that would be that album done, in a puff of magical dust they would be gone but not forgotten, just another notch on Steele’s gingerbread bed post (let’s just imagine he lives in a gingerbread house for a second). Thom Yorke‘s ‘The Eraser’ came out 3 years ago now, which is quite a long time to abstain from performing it live. I’d surrendered to the fact that I’d never hear songs from my favourite album of all time live, and I was sort of fine with it. “You never know – he might bash out a bit of ‘Cymbal Rush’ at a Radiohead gig and confuse all the people there who just wanted to hear ‘Creep’ and ‘Fake Plastic Trees’,” I thought, whilst holding back the tears like the brave soldier I am.

Thom of course played a set at this year’s Latitude Festival which I was gutted to miss. My sister was there and I told her to ring me when he played ‘Black Swan’ but given she doesn’t know the album too well she only realised it was ‘Black Swan’ in the last 30 seconds where Yorke repeatedly sings ‘Black Swan’. “Nae Bother!” I thought. In Scottish. I was at Lovebox and consoled myself by going to buy a croissant. Watching that footage back on YouTube, the gig seemed great, Thom seemed to be happy but hearing his songs being stripped down to their bare skewiff acoustic sounds wasn’t ever going to project ‘The Eraser’’s textured qualities, with such lush drum beats and soaring samples being abandoned.

So! When the news finally came out, as bizarre and unexpected as it was, that Thom would be playing three gigs with his new band family made up of Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea, Brazilian multi-instrumentalist Mauro Refosco, REM collaborator Joey Waronker and long term producer Nigel Godrich, I was very curious to see how it would turn out. And joy of joys! Watching the footage back leaves me completely breathless – finally, to hear a band elevating all its intricacies to a euphoric level, it was enough to make a tough soldier’s chin tremble. Sure it’s fucking weird watching Flea bob away on the delicately ethereal ‘Atoms For Peace’, but Thom‘s hardly the king of conventional, and his backing band were never going to be a bunch of conventional session musicians.

Here’s the title track live, it’s absolutely stunning!

I really, really hope they come to the UK at some point. They have to right? It would literally make me the happiest person on earth to see this live. Even happier than if Paolo Nutini came into do an In The Courtyard session.