Suck Your Teenage Thumb (Toilet Trained And Dumb)

If you want to get a good idea as to why Radiohead is, has been, and probably always be a wildly popular band, you should really view this concert from 1994.

First off, I should say how surprised I was, as the footage started to play, to see just how young Thom Yorke looks. He could easily pass for 18 at the time (he was actually 25) but has no trouble whatsoever commanding the stage during every song. It's pretty clear that this concert took place between the release of Pablo Honey (the band's debut) and The Bends, with the show's playlist providing a fairly balanced mixture of the two. This makes the DVD a particular treat for me, since those are probably my two favourite Radiohead albums (though I pretty much love them all, now).

A couple things are interesting about the fact that The Bends hadn't come out at the time of this concert. First, Yorke repeatedly "apologizes" (in word and by body language) for the fact that they're playing songs that the crowd won't recognize, which seems very forthright to me. The fact is, though, that the boys do such a fantastic job on the new material that some of the selections have the audience totally getting into them by the end ("Black Star" and "My Iron Lung" are perhaps the best examples of this). And that's what really blew me away about the performances of the The Bends songs: they're absolutely dead-on! You'd think these guys had been playing them for years at this point. Very impressive!

"Creep" was the biggest crowd-pleaser, which is no surprise since it put the band on the map originally (and then its over-shadowing popularity gave them something to rail against later). But virtually every song, whether it was "new" or "old", got huge responses from the stoners, rockers, preppies and curiousity-seekers in front of the stage. At no point did any of them look bored, and no wonder: with the amazingly complex lyrics and shifting, driving musical beats at their disposal, Radiohead (even the 1994 version) should absolutely kill in concert... and now I know that they do! They may look like any other band of the day, but there's so much more to them than just about anyone else I've ever heard or seen in the past three decades. I have no idea how guys so young were able to produce music of the caliber that they've done, CD after CD, but they did (and are still doing it, even as middle-aged gits). No wonder they've got the incredible reputation and following that they do (and this particular DVD was just the 1.0 or 1.5 edition of the group).

Or maybe it's just the quiet "fuck you" that Thom delivers to the audience in the middle of "Stop Whispering"! Or the Captain America t-shirt that one of the bass players was wearing...

P.S. Two and a half weeks after this concert, the New York Rangers capped off their incredible playoff run by winning the Stanley Cup! Suck that, punks!