Review – Radiohead: Australia Tour 2012

If you paid a princely sum for tickets and travelled interstate* to go see one of your favourite bands, you would definitely expect it to be a great concert.
Your expectations would be even higher if this band happened to be, oh I don’t know, Radio-fucking-head!

Well, this is what your humble reviewer was expecting. And while I did get a decent performance, a “trippy” set and three(!) encores, I wouldn’t consider this concert to be in my top 10 concerts – and I’ve only been to just over a dozen.

So what was wrong with the concert?
Well, the venue for starters. Brisbane Entertainment Centre is not a bad venue per se, but it was definitely not the right venue for a Radiohead concert.
By design, Entertainment Centres are well suited for events that happen in the middle of the auditorium – not on a stage setup on one end. So that more than half the seated audience are facing perpendicularly away from the stage.

Then there was the underwhelming set. Sure, it was cool, different, hip and other-terms-hipsters-are-using-these-days-to-describe-their-haircuts, but it didn’t wow me. U2’s stage from their 360 tour was larger than life and Red Hot Chili Pepper’s electronics extravaganza was mesmerizing, but Radiohead’s cleverly suspended screens were just, in some ironic way, vain. All we could see, was more of Thom Yorke.

Which brings me to my biggest problem with the show – Thom I-perform-for-myself Yorke. No really, Thom Yorke would get just as much pleasure from performing in front of his bathroom mirror as he did that night on stage. Given that it was their first show in Australia in nearly a decade, you’d think a ‘Hello Australia’ wouldn’t go astray. But no, Mr. Yorke said all of four words all night, two of them being “Free Tibet”. Not why or how or when, no nothing. If Thom Yorke wants to be that introverted even on stage, in front of his die-hard fans, then maybe rock stardom isn’t such a great career for him.

Don’t get me wrong, the concert was still quite amazing. In fact, had this been most other bands, we would’ve thought this was one of the best concerts ever, but given that it was Radiohead, I guess we expected (and why not) a little more. For those playing at home, they played most of their new album and a lot of their well-known hits (yes, even Street Spirit and no, not Creep).

I once believed in the power of rock and roll (and music in general) to make a significant dent in the world, but after seeing concerts like this, I feel that it’s just an avenue for escapism – the very feeling that Thom Yorke has tried to attack in many of his songs.

*There were a surprising number of people who made the trip.