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There are some funny stage fails in Radiohead’s concert history (most of them documented on YouTube), they show a momentarily failed cooperation between humans and machines: Thom Yorke has a fit of laughter because a voice sample that cannot be turned off stoically interrupts his live singing; Thom Yorke leaves the stage angry because Jonny Greenwood can’t turn off his rhythm machine, but Yorke doesn’t want to keep dancing for hours either. The audience experienced a similarly impressive moment at the band’s second Berlin concert yesterday (read the concert report on the first performance here).
The man-machine
During song twelve, “Sit Down, Stand Up,” Greenwood spends too long at the keyboard creating and doesn’t make it over to his sequencer in time to hit keys. The dramatic, pumping beats accompanying the real drums start too late and at the wrong time. Yorke initially tries to adjust his singing, but then takes his hands off his piano keys and the entire band falls out of sync. Yorke wipes his hands on his trouser legs and gives Greenwood a wonderfully angry look, which I hope someone filmed or photographed because it’s rare to see him look like that in public (here is a video, but without focus on Yorke).
Greenwood, meanwhile, has long since raised both arms in the air in an “I’m innocent!” gesture. The e-beats continue. Phil Selway starts the drum rhythm again, Greenwood presses the right button at the right moment this time, Yorke starts again on his piano, the band finishes “Sit Down, Stand Up”. “This machinery is unpredictable!” says Yorke afterwards. “Machinery” instead of “machine” – he means the big picture. Kraftwerk, who are performing in a hall just a few meters away on the same evening, something like that couldn’t happen.
The audience applauds, loving Radiohead for this perfect imperfection. A live breakdown that offers a fascinating insight into the arrangements of a band that pairs various electric and acoustic instruments with electronics, and in which there is no playback or backing tape to make up for the missing seconds when Jonny Greenwood runs from one machine park to the other a tad late, which was simply because he was too dreamy playing somewhere else. These reverse-engineered insights into the workings of one of the best studio bands of our time are worth their weight in gold.
Round stage and quadrants
Radiohead perform on a round stage, so any mishaps or improvisations are much funnier to watch than on a frontal stage. The musicians play in their own quadrant, rarely next to each other – the result is jerky “What’s this all about here all of a sudden?” head movements over the shoulder (when Thom Yorke stands at the main microphone with his guitar, and that applies to twelve of the 25 songs, the sound mixer is even behind him, here too there are jerky glances over the shoulder).
How does “Berlin 2” compare to “Berlin 1”? The setlist differs in 14 of 25 pieces, which corresponds to the difference from the previous “Copenhagen 2” and “Copenhagen 1”. Radiohead have developed a set dramaturgy that is ideal for them from the 65 songs they rehearsed for the tour. In Berlin, the respective classic albums have so far been distributed fairly fairly between the first two appearances: “Lucky” vs. “Airbag”, “The Gloaming” vs. “Myxomatosis”, “The National Anthem” vs. “Optimistic”. “Berlin 2” seems a little more elegiac thanks to its ballads “Nude,” “Reckoner,” “Pyramid Song” and “How To Disappear Completely.” On “Nude”, Ed O’Brien, who is rarely in the spotlight, plays the guitar solo, while Jonny Greenwood folds his arms behind his back – a well-intentioned “I’m not the center of attention now” gesture.
It is also clear that “Jigsaw Falling Into Place,” which has long been despised on Radiohead tours, is an absolute favorite song, judging by the audience’s cheers. However, it is also clear that the sound does not work properly. In all songs in which three electric guitars are played, the highs no longer make it through the bass and the “sound mash” is created. The Britpop-like “The Bends” (would also have fit well on the Travis album “Good Feeling”) and “Bodysnatchers” are no longer recognizable during some passages.
Acoustic highlights
The songs with acoustic guitar are nicer to listen to, such as the suicidal “Exit Music (For a Film)”, which seems like a lost Canzone Italiana piece, including Greenwood’s giallo organ tones, and at the quiet end of which a spectator shouts a perfectly timed “Bravo!” calls. This is almost no longer Canzone Italiana, but Italian opera.
Since the path from the round stage in the middle of the hall to the backstage area is too long, Radiohead descend a staircase after the end of the main set, remain under their stage until the encore and put their heads together there. Hopefully Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood have made up again.
The first concert evening ended with “Karma Police”, a song that shouldn’t actually work because it combines resignation with a declaration of war. The conclusion of “Berlin 2” is even better, it is more powerful than any of their songs before it. “There There” combines the thunder of two drums and two stand-up drum sets, an angry, nervous, tribalistic groping into the unconscious, not redeemed but intensified by Jonny Greenwood’s later switch to lead guitar. His crazy, torturous solo advances the cavalry of rhythm. “There There” is the song that Colonel Kurtz must have heard in the jungle when he said “The Horror, the Horror.”