All your Radiohead-fan friends hoofed it to San Jose last night to see Radiohead, and we hear it was a good set, heavy on material from last year's King of Limbs but with plenty of older favorites thrown in. Also, Thom Yorke has a ponytail now, and a certain critic over at NBC seems to believe that Joshua Tree was a Radiohead album.
Yorke was "po-going through '15 Step,' ponytail (!) flapping back and forth from his Joshua-Tree-era vest to his familiar stubble..." according to NBC Bay Area scribe Scott Budman, and so it would appear that Budman has confused Yorke with Bono, or something.
Reportedly, Yorke introduced "The Amazing Sounds of Orgy" (from the Amnesiac era) by saying to the sold-out San Jose Arena crowd, "This is a song about when banks started investing in bullshit. Silicon Valley bullllshit." Everyone cheered.
Meanwhile, Jim Harrington of the Oakland Tribune says the band "came up a bit short" with last night's show. But we think he's just being a snarky bitch for the sake of it, since he calls their 2008 Outside Lands set "majestic" and all we can remember about it was that the sound cut out four or five times.
The Guardian's Charles Russo, a devoted fan, says it was "a high-energy performance from an eclectic setlist that was at once a gem for fanatics and a thrill for the casual fans that they dragged along."
And Ian S. Port at the Weekly says it was "a pretty great concert even as far as Radiohead shows go" and writes, "After the general loathing of the OK Computer era, and the isolated gloom of Kid A and Amnesiac, Yorke (and the band) seem to have found their footing in The Beat."
