Photographs & interview by GREG WILLIAMS
As told to JANE CROWTHER
Greg Williams spends three days with one of the world’s biggest and most elusive bands as they play sell-out gigs on their first tour for seven years.
I’m lucky enough to have been backstage a number of times at events, awards shows, gigs and theatre productions, but I felt a particular sense of privilege to join Radiohead on the road for a slice of their 20-date European tour in December last year. Not only because the fiercely private five-piece rarely allow access, but because to attend a Radiohead show – as an audience member or as part of the crew – is almost religious in feeling. No two sets or shows are ever alike and for fans, it’s like going to church to stand in a room with a band that has dominated music for three decades (they’ve been together for 40 years) and have, as individuals, been major players in the creation of music in movies. For me, there’s a sense of communion or seance to be a part of the crowd listening to the artistry of a group of passionate, unique musicians and it’s something I desperately wanted to document.
I first met Thom Yorke at the Venice Film Festival in 2018 when he’d done the soundtrack to Suspiria. He was at an event in an old palazzo and I saw a really beautiful old mottled mirror in the room with a candle in front of it. I thought for Thom’s look, him reflected in it would be a cool picture. I introduced myself and I told him the idea and that if he would let me take it, I’d show it to him and if he hated it, I’d kill it. He agreed. I took the pictures and he liked them and we arranged to do more the following day (they were later used as publicity for a record he was putting out). The next night we met up at about 1am after finishing with our other commitments and walked around Venice taking photos together. Since then, I shot him as he filmed Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘one reeler’ Anima for Netflix with his wife, Dajana. My wife, Daisy, and I were guests at their wedding in Sicily. We’ve built a rapport based on trust. So when I heard that Radiohead were on tour, I reached out and asked if I could shadow them for a few dates.
I travelled to Thom’s hotel in Bologna spending the first night playing pool with him and Paul Thomas Anderson, who was hanging out and watching three of their gigs ‘in hiding’ from his press tour for his Jonny Greenwood-scored and Oscar buzzy One Battle After Another. The following morning we drove to the Unipol Arena on the tour bus, through the beautiful, rolling countryside. Thom and Ed O’Brien ride in the bus and choose the set list, while Jonny Greenwood, Philip Selway and Colin Greenwood travel separately to meet at the venue. This time is a crucial part of the tour, picking the set from their extensive catalogue (they’ve rehearsed 64 songs) that fans try to predict online before each gig. Sitting in the working area on the lower floor, Thom and Ed discuss what they played the previous night and how to change the set for the upcoming show. When that’s done, Thom moves upstairs to the sleeping area to nap. Even just a half hour in the bunk helps both focus and creativity. It’s something he does again before the show.
When we arrive at the venue, we are joined by Jonny, Colin and Philip for lunch before soundcheck. The staging for the show is unique; in the round, it has the vibe of a rehearsal space or recording studio. There are cameras everywhere and giant screens that surround the stage at first cocooning the band before lifting high above them, projecting to the crowd. The backstage area where the stage crew and technicians would normally be is instead sub-stage. Unsurprisingly, Radiohead’s soundcheck is a detailed process that takes close to an hour. They’re always moving from instrument to instrument – at one point four different members of the band are on drums. Jonny will move from glockenspiel to keyboard, to a drum, to guitars. He’ll be playing a guitar with a violin bow, Thom might be playing a keyboard or a guitar or a tambourine… Colin has a Leica camera on his amp; he’s a keen and gifted photographer and has a beautiful book of photos of Radiohead, How to Disappear, that I highly recommend.
Once the soundcheck is complete, it’s time for pre-show prep. Backstage, each band member has their own dressing room and routine before they meet up about 20 minutes before the concert. In that time Thom writes new music in his muted-light dressing room – the music comes before the words most of the time apparently. Often he’ll write a song for a while, and then he’ll let it fallow. He might leave it for four months and then come back to it again. ‘The process is a messy one either way,’ Thom explains of writing music. ‘If the priority is a vocal, if the priority is a sound, a mood, following the movement of a specific scene… all takes you down a different chaotic path. Keeping a distance from where the music ends up seems important in film for me… but I’m a novice compared with Jonny obviously. It’s very easy to get too granular about the relationship between what I am watching and how the music falls with it. For someone like me, working in film is a relief sometimes when the vocal is not the centre of things, a way to mess around in the studio and experiment without being specific. For Jonny it is different, he is more skilled and versatile at studying and co-opting different styles and genres of music, which kind of boggles my mind sometimes. Also he’s always experimenting and looking for reasons to use those experiments.’ Next, Thom will have another 30 minute nap before doing an extensive yoga session. He finishes by resting under a blanket and eye mask in deep prep for the show before getting dressed and joining the rest of the band.
The band will hug each other before heading to the stage. Security part the crowd, creating a pathway to the stage to allow them to walk through. And then the sea of fans closes up again. When you’re in the middle you’re in for the whole gig.
Under the stage, the band grab their guitars and check monitors and head up on stage to a colossal roar. Down below stage you never really hear the show that well. You hear a clash of cymbals, some drums, and noise but not much else because the speakers are all pointing away from you. When the band started the encore with Fake Plastic Trees, which is a bit of a number for me personally, I headed out front and took out my earplugs and put down my cameras and just sang my heart out along with 16,000 other fans. There’s something particularly special that you feel watching Radiohead and the fact that you don’t know what you’re going to get; they might play a song they haven’t played for nine years. It feels creative, organic, unique – and in spaces that feel intimate. Apparently 2.2 million people tried to buy tickets to this tour and the average person buys between two to four tickets, so you can do the maths on what they could have made – instead they chose to sell just 400,000 tickets and only play arenas, where the audience is circa 14-22,000, because they want to give that intimacy to the fans that is lost in stadiums where you can play to up to 100,000. ‘We’ve never really done stadiums on a regular basis, just one-offs, festivals etc… It’s not really us,’ Thom shrugs. ‘There is a larger-than-life aspect to the performance that just grinds you down.’
The money doesn’t appear to be the big driver for these shows; it’s creating an experience for the fans. ‘Collectively sharing/playing your work in front of so many people, seeing it through their eyes as well as your own is important obviously… in a lot of ways,’ says Thom. ‘You reconnect with something that may have been tortuous to record or finish writing for example, and suddenly it can take on another meaning, become something beyond what you remember. It’s just a concert, but sometimes it breaks through somehow, more than the sum of the parts. Also playing and singing everyday just kind of loosens you up! Seeing the effect of what you create in this way keeps the fires burning I guess – once the tour is over and you’ve picked yourself back up that is…’
Standing at the top of the arena and looking down into the beacon of stage light at the centre with the crowd ghosting around it reminded me of the pictures from 1930s boxing matches. Leonardo DiCaprio has come out for the show to join PTA and we all leave the afterparty and jump on the tour bus back to the hotel, Jonny Greenwood on form folding paper airplanes out of the day’s setlists and launching them like darts at us all…
Photographs & words by GREG WILLIAMS
radiohead.com
wasteheadquarters.com
wasteheadquarters.com/schedule
radiohead.com/library
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