Everything in its Right Place

For those of you who set their watches by such things, you’ll have noticed that this week’s post has dropped exactly 24 hours late. I meant to put something up Friday night and schedule it for the usual Saturday 9am slot but was, not to put too fine a point on it, totally knackered. The last few weeks have been tough at work, but there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Let’s hope it’s not an oncoming train.

One large silver lining from this week was getting to see Thom Yorke in concert. His solo show “Everything” is making its way across Japan from southwest to northeast and, for once, the promoters didn’t skip Nagoya. Nagoya has a bad reputation among tour managers and booking agents because shows there rarely sell out. In fact, venues are usually half empty. For some reason it’s difficult to entice Nagoyans out of their hovels. Not so last week, with the 3000+ capacity Century Hall sold out.

I’ve never seen Radiohead live, and since they are on a semi-permanent hiatus, I may never get to. This is probably the closest I’ll get, so there was no way I was missing it. I’m still unsure how I’ve never seen them live. I’ve been a fan since The Bends came out in 1995 and I didn’t move to Japan until 2005. That’s ten years when they were touring incessantly and I was in the right place, yet somehow it never happened.

I did get one chance and this is still my biggest musical regret. On March 15, 1995, they played The Lemon Tree in Aberdeen. The Lemon Tree is a 550-capacity venue where I saw so many amazing bands over the years. I get a rush of nostalgia just remembering queueing up outside. Anyway, they played March 15. The Bends was released on March 13. This is pre-internet, kids, so I hadn’t heard it yet. I must have heard “My Iron Lung” and “High and Dry” which had been released as singles already, but if I had, they hadn’t made much of an impact on me yet. I didn’t really like the first album, Pablo Honey (still don’t), so when a friend said she had a spare ticket for the gig, I turned it down.

Dumbass.

They would never play venues that small again. They would never play Aberdeen again. They were about to become one of the biggest bands in the world.

Dumbass.

In my defence I was 14 and I lived in the countryside an hour outside Aberdeen with an irregular bus service. Still, I saw plenty of other gigs, so that’s not much consolation.

So this week I got to see Thom Yorke. As the tour name suggests, he’s playing everything from across his entire career—Radiohead, The Smile, Atoms for Peace, his solo albums—all mixed together. He’s changing the setlist every night so we didn’t know what to expect. We just knew it would be special.

It was.

I say we: pretty much all the middle-aged gaijin in Nagoya were out in force. The lobby was a cavalcade of tired, portly men in Radiohead shirts holding cans of beer and shouting “hisashiburi” (long time no see) at each other.

We got “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi”, “Pyramid Song”, “Kid A”, “Glass Eyes”, “Everything in its Right Place”, “Bloom”, “Airbag”, “Idioteque”, “Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box”, and “Bodysnatchers” from the Radiohead back catalogue. He’s been playing “Fake Plastic Trees”, “Karma Police”, “Lucky”. and a few other acoustic songs on this tour but Nagoya got the full on EDM/Drum and Bass Thom Yorke, apart from opener and closer “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi” and “Bodysnatchers”

So 10 out of 22 were Radiohead songs, a good return. Some of the others I knew (“Pana-Vision” by The Smile, “Atoms for Peace”, “Last I Heard (… He was Circling the Drain”) and others were new to me. A perfect mix, in my book. I want to know some songs in a set but I also want to hear new stuff. Thom delivered. The only down point was, as you can see from the video above and below, Century Hall is a concert hall. Usually orchestras play there. It’s all seating. We on the ground floor were allowed to stand which was good because, as you can see here, we were right behind the sound desk:

But we were still standing in between rows of seats which greatly limits your dancing moves, and Thom was in a dancing mood and we wanted us to join in. We tried, Thom, we tried.

There are a few shows coming up early in the new year—Cavalera, The Almighty, Green Day, Mogwai, PJ Harvey, Offspring, maybe Oasis—but only Green Day is in Nagoya, so there will be a lot of travelling and business hotels involved. Still, teenage Iain is delighted that so many bucket list bands are being ticked off. This will be my first time to say any of those bands apart from Green Day and Mogwai, and Green Day I’ve only see at festivals, not their own show. Looks like I’m firmly in the nostalgia market demographic, and loving it.