Radiohead took to the stage at Coachella 2012 on Saturday night and quite easily took the badge for uncomfortable performance of the night. Thom Yorke’s ever edgy and captivating performance took the crowd through recent material such as Bloom, 15 Step, Weird Fishes/Arpleggi and Good Morning Mr Magpie which didn’t seem to go down too well with the festival crowd.
Radiohead should have learnt their lesson in 2009 when they did the same at the Reading / Leeds Festival and although the Leeds set was fantastic with amazing light shows and an animated performance by Yorke and Co, the crowd just didn’t quite gel with the level of new material on show. The following night in Reading the band decided to throw in more classics and all of a sudden the performance is hailed as the best of the festival weekend!
Many of the crowd at Coachella seemed bored and a fair few even wondered off to other stages but once the band dropped some classics like Pyramid Song, Karma Police, Lucky and Paranoid Android the event warmed up somewhat and saw the crowds swell once again.
It’s pretty obvious that Radiohead aren’t the type of band who want to be stereotyped as a division of one particular style and definately don’t want to be dining out on old classics for years to come but maybe need to play to the audience a bit more. The band have released a wealth of briliant material over the past few years and I think it is fair to say that true Radiohead fans would agree the band just get better with age but festivals aren’t made up of hardcore Radiohead fans so maybe throwing out the classics is the way forward – or maybe messers Yorke and Greenwood just couldn’t give a flying f**k what non Radiohead fans think and are actually only performing for the minority – which suits me just fine!
Repost This Article
I think the new Radiohead stuff is amazing. They are a band who make music which is art as opposed to a mere product. Did you go to the festival old boy?
Totally agree mate, unfortunately not in Coachella at the moment but following the gigs closely from blighty. I saw Radiohead at Leeds in 2009 and they were amazing, they played all the new stuff then too and it beat a ‘classics’ set for me!