THOM YORKE
Sydney Opera House Forecourt, November 1
THE NIGHT BEGAN AND ENDED with a voice in an expanse of emptiness, firstly with piano and then an acoustic guitar, but otherwise just the humid air and an internalised hum of expectation.
It began with that voice asking “please excuse me but I’ve got to ask: you only being nice because you want something?”. It ended with that voice declaring “this isn’t happening, I’m not here. I’m not here.” It began with that voice weary rather than forlorn, resigned maybe, rather than crushed. It ended with loneliness and desolation, accepting.
And it was captivating, from beginning to end.
Thom Yorke solo – not just without his long-time band, Radiohead or the members of his main side project, The Smile, but a one-man operation within a semi-circle of (sometimes semi-organic) machines and a visual display that was fuse-and-mind-blowing – was not hiding from his reputation as a borderline misanthrope, a terminal melancholic and that odd bloke from IT who never says a word or year but suddenly breaks into flexi-joint dancing at the Christmas party.
But he did show how that reputation is merely an opening gambit, and in a sense missing the point of how generous emotions exist in all of those sides. How the heart-filling and heart-crushing at the same time Let Down (sung with acoustic guitar and openness, and for many people worth the price of admission alone) cast an inclusive spell, and Packt Like Sardines In A Crushd Tin Box’s rickety beats and tinny sounds made for irresistible rhythms. How Present Tense, with it’s almost Costa del Sol guitar figure and rhythm felt light and cocktail-hour, and Black Swan had its twisted, bass-driven rhythm make a cruising speed descent into a netherworld’s fringes so darkly funky.
Even more so, All I Need, a sparse mood piece of disturbed love and unhealthy need that still was something to revel in, finding low key euphoria in the line “yesterday I work up sucking on a lemon, and offering Fake Plastic Trees, teetering on the edge of abandonment but warm and strangely exultant, was fan servicing of the first order.
Don’t worry fans of glum reading this, as the swirling wind around the centre of piano and solid unsettledness in Bloom showed, discomfort – and not just the rain which arrived 80 minutes in, providing a soft soaking but resisting a storm – was always part of the deal too. There is pleasure in it after all, as with the pinging machines, bracketed beats and dislocated voice samples of a hospital ward coming to life in Not The News, all “swimming in treacle”.
The way the piano interacted with expanding machines and the suggestion of bouncing atomic particles in Cymbal Rush, the wheezy synth and brittle drums in Truth Ray creating the sense of being lost in the city but not yet searching for a route out, or using the instrumental Volk’s soundtrack to a sinister laboratory scene as a preamble to the spectral sounds and crumbling psyche of Pyramid Song, made shadows appear even in the dark.
But then, like that vulnerable voice in that boundless space, shadows can be beautiful too.
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A version of this review was originally published in The Sydney Morning Herald
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