For more images from the show, see our Radiohead photo gallery.
One thing that really sets Radiohead apart from other stadium rock bands is that no one is allowed to hate them. I can’t imagine a quicker route to social suicide than announcing to all and sundry at a cocktail party, or to your companion on a first date, that you hate Radiohead with a burning passion. I dare you to try it one evening as a social experiment. You might as well take a dump on a dinner plate and wipe yourself with a table napkin.
The flip side of this quirk of our age is that normal people have no shame about acting like unabashedly geeky fans, even in Toronto. Will we see another platinum-selling act in our lifetime open their shows with a song like “15 Step,” a jittery percussion loop in 5/4 time, anchored by a bright, folky guitar figure and Thom Yorke’s vocal line wobbling like a centrifuge about to fly off its base? And follow it with three more similarly clattering but not quite rocking numbers (“Reckoner,” “Optimistic,” a particularly fiery “There There” aided by plenty of extra drums) and be cheered like Super Bowl winners in a homecoming parade?
Probably not. They may not be the most artistically daring act in the world, but they are really, really good at balancing experimentation while gauging our patience for it. Radiohead demand their audience’s full attention, but they don’t abuse it.
(Openers Grizzly Bear, on the other hand, managed to abuse us in the most passive-aggressive way possible: sheer dullness. Their rustic vocal harmonies were pure sonic chloroform, and any nuances songs like the sunny "Knife" they might have had were lost in a muddy sound mix. You know you're in trouble when the appearance of two rainbows crowds out your memory of the band itself.)
Those rabid Radiohead fans expecting a set full of hits would have been disappointed by the absence of “Just,” “Fake Plastic Trees” and other pre-Kid A standards. Except that “those” people barely exist — nobody who even vaguely follows this band would have been surprised by their reluctance to play to the crowd’s expectations. Instead we got a sampling of where they’ve been in the current millennium, from Yorke inserting a frantic, mumbled interlude (“walkin, walkin, walkin” etc.) into a very fast and spirited “Morning Bell” (using the Kid A arrangement) and a less-intense-than-expected version of “Pyramid Song,” visually accented by hanging fluorescent tubes whose animations looked something like The Matrix.
Yet another thing that makes Radiohead stand out is that they always manage to make their songs groove harder live than they do on record, mostly thanks to drummer Phil Selway, who doesn’t get nearly enough credit for animating the band’s effete compositions with a hard-but-not-heavy touch. When in the encore they played their most famous b-side, “Talk Show Host” (with Yorke offering the little-performed track as a thanks to the crowds for enduring the rain, saying, “go get lots of vitamin C and find someone to take home with you and keep you warm”), Selway was a perpetual motion machine, his arms moving smoothly in time to produce volleys of clanging metal.
The band relented in the two encores and broke out classic tracks from The Bends (“Street Spirit (Fade Out),” “Planet Telex”) and OK Computer (“Airbag,” which gave Jonny Greenwood a chance to demonstrate his electronics mastery with ethereal squalls of guitar harmonics and delay pedal insanity). It was pure fan service. But it also showed what separates the two halves of their careers: at the height of their fame, they traded in their youthful bombast and grandeur for a communal approach that put the group above the self.
A delicate yet still propulsive song like “House Of Cards” isn’t what 18-year-old boys dream of cranking out on arena stages, and you’ll get your rocks off a lot faster thrashing away at power chords than playing auxiliary percussion — even if Ed O’Brien does do a fine job of making playing a shaker egg look manly. But that’s what most of their new songs consist of; little bits that add up to an impressive whole. If there’s a single reason why Radiohead get to be the band you’re not allowed to hate, it’s because their artistic progress is what many of us aspire to — to become calmer, less outwardly noisy but no less passionate adult versions of our younger selves, working together.
And if Thom Yorke and company seem cranky about their stardom sometimes, well, maybe having it all figured out gets to be a bit of a burden. You can’t be selfless all the time.