Deer Hoof and Beck were supporting.
Deer Hoof were certainly interesting. A four piece band with oddly structured songs, a generous use of pauses, outstanding and unique minimalistic drumming (By this I mean the kit was minimalistic, not the actual style) with sometimes no more than a sentence worth of lyrics to a song and fronted by a fairly eccentric Japanese girl.
Beck... well everyone knows who Beck is. I only really know his well-known songs, but he was entertaining and the puppets, and pre-performance video of their time in Edinburgh was great.
By the time Radiohead opened with Airbag I was about one metre from the barrier at the stage. I remember singing my head off with the crowd and thinking how lovely Thom Yorke looked in his little denim jacket!
The following songs however were slightly torturous. The crowd for some odd reason were really violent! This is not what anyone would expect from a Radiohead gig. This is the same band that hung up posters around the huge blue tent they had made on the the Big Top tour saying “Radiohead kindly request NO MOSHING”
This was without a doubt the scariest crowd I ever had the misfortune of being in, though I think it was possibly a case of a small number of people spoiling it for everyone else. After the fourth song I’d had quite enough. My jeans were half way down my backside, my hair was getting pulled in every direction, I had actually been lifted up and suspended off my feet for a good few seconds by the sheer force of the crowds’s movement and left there until dropped and had absolutely no control whatsoever over any of my limbs or which direction I was headed!!!
In hindsight I should have gone over the barrier but as that's where the crowds undercurrent was coming from - I decided to go back through the crowds which took forever as it is rather a large stadium. Thankfully during 'Morning Bell', Thom decided to stop the song half way through in order to calm the crowd down and express his disapproval. This bought me enough time to get out without too much casualty.
So all in all this was a bit of a strange gig for me because there was a fair amount of shock and tears involved. :( But heck, crying at a radiohead concert! I’m sure it’s not the first time it's ever happened right?
The open air stadium was an excellent venue and made for an enjoyable atmosphere. The band were in full swing as usual and Thom's voice seemed to get better with each song. Videotape, Nude, All I Need, Bodysnatchers were all new songs on the setlist at that time and were to be recorded a year later for the 'In Rainbows' album.
Radiohead closed the set with a rather sarcastic version of ‘creep.’ A song that I never in a million years expected I would ever get to see them perform!
All in all it was nothing if not a memorable gig!
I will be adding more gigs soon on my bootlegs website !!!
Lots of love,
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