A sinister wall of synths and strings shoots from the tiny Sydney Opera House forecourt stage.
One of music’s most formidable creatives is cheering himself on as the flickering orange glow illuminates his half-cocked cackle, making him look like a mad scientist as he fiddles away with his equipment and twists his arms into the air. It’s just Thom Yorke on stage, but his sound is so dense and impenetrable that he might as well have an entire band helping him out.
He usually does.
While Radiohead hasn’t officially disbanded, Yorke’s interests have been in other projects lately. The Smile, which he formed with Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood and jazz drummer Tom Skinner, has challenged Yorke to create some of the best music of his career – which he has – and the man’s innumerous solo material is so good that it deserves more recognition. Then you’ve got great songs from his time with the supergroup Atmos For Peace.
And I guess that’s the point of Thom Yorke’s brief but incredibly well-received flirt down under. The British multi-instrumentalist is calling this tour Everything. Unlike many things the man does, the name is literal. This is everything: solo songs, Radiohead songs, Atmos For Peace songs and The Smile songs all packaged into one thematically and tonally consistent performance that’s deeply satisfying, despite some glaring set list ommissions.
For just over an hour, Thom Yorke stared at the Sydney Opera House stairs as the forecourt sprung to life for the first of two sold-out shows. He opened modestly with a pitch-perfect performance of “The Eraser,” closed gently with “How To Disappear Completely,” and for the entire show functioned as somewhat of a man vs machine, with heavy electronics lifting his ghosty vocals.
That song I mentioned above. The sinister one. It could have just as well been titled “It’s Alive!” with Thom Yorke’s jerky movements and erratic bursts of excitement perfectly apt for Halloween. But it’s not called “It’s Alive!” The song in question is “Volk,” a scratchy, terrifying composition Yorke created for Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria.
It’s one of many examples of Yorke cleverly dipping into his body of work and quite literally giving us *everything*.
Well, almost everything.
It’d be impossible for this man to completely satisfy every camp that worships him. The Radiohead fans wanted more Radiohead. The Thom Yorke fans just enjoyed listening to his more obscure work. Considering the set list, I think he did his absolute best. For the Radiohead fans – and there were a lot of them, me included – Yorke surprised with an achingly fragile rendition of “Fake Plastic Trees” amongst many others, including “Reckoner,” Bloom,” and “Everything In Its Right Place.” The latter closed out the main set before a three-song encore.
But yes, impossible. I knew I was going to leave thinking “If he only played that one song” (which he did the following night – “Idioteque”). And usually, I’d dig into my inner child’s self-entitlement, acting like I’ve just been delivered a gross injustice. But it’s also nigh impossible to be disappointed with Thom Yorke.
This a man who is so fucking good at music that he could attempt almost anything and make it work.
That’s why The Smile’s modest discography is so sharp and satisfying. And it’s why Thom Yorke’s solo work is every bit as good as his Radiohead material. He proved it constantly throughout the set, favouring effect-heavy, spritey tracks like “Back in the Game,” which he recently created in collaboration with Australia’s own Mark Pritchard.
Pritchard, best known for his electronic work with the likes of solo project Harmonic 313 and Steve Spacek, is a pro when it comes to channelling the glitchy, sporadic beats best credited to underground Detroit hip hop. So it was fascinating to hear a Detroit-style production elevated by Yorke’s melismatic wails on the fresh track, which he only debuted live in Melbourne days prior.
Whether Yorke becomes the third member of Slum Village remains to be seen, but so far it sounds like the British singer is surprisingly comfortable with that spooky underground Detroit hip-hop sound.
That song and its incredibly dense sound came towards the end of the set, but in many ways “Back in the Game” defines what Thom Yorke gave us the entire night. Again, it’s that man vs machine approach to music, subtracting his band but adding a tonne of electronics, in a way challenging himself so that it doesn’t just look like another musician performing on stage. This was a man hard at work, building up these walls of sound and then adding a great deal of colour to them; all the while stripping things back on occasion and showing us that Thom Yorke is still very much the same man who wrote brilliant indie anthems like “Let Down” and “All I Need.”
He’ll never change. And we’ll never want him to.
FIVE STARS (OUT OF FIVE)
The reviewer attended this concert on 1st November, 2024
Header photo credit: Bruce Baker
