radiohead

so i saw radiohead last night. they mostly lived up to my expectations, it certainly could have been a little better, and i'll attribute most of that to the venue, but all in all it was still pretty special.

Going in, I didn't really know what to expect from the stage/crowd/atmosphere. I'd say about half of the crowd was just in town for the concert and the other half was just czechs with money or a little curiousity to see what all the buzz was about but weren't really familiar with too much radiohead. most of the tickets go to all the big companies and they were having problems getting rid of them all, so there were more than a few suits in the crowd. (i'd say your typical czech likes hard rock mostly anyway, think depeche mode but with a modern twist, so needless to say radiohead isn't exactly up their alley.)

but despite the atmospheric shortcomings, Radiohead failed to dissapoint. The show was typically atypical with little Thommy Yorke (who is really quite small in stature) really exerting some serious energy prancing around the stage all the while not forgetting to add that eccentric touch by putting a lemon on the keyboard during "everything in its right place" for the lyric "yesterday i woke up sucking a lemon." or the set seemingly ending with the band already having left the stage but the music still going of "how to dissapear completely." those were just a few.

in terms of highlights, the encore was probably my favorite half hour of the whole set. Pyramid song, National Anthem, 2+2, etc. Other memorable ones for me were 15 step, There There, Lucky, and predictably Idioteque with Thom really getting into it. I kept hoping for a couple things that I was sure weren't going to come and they didn't but what are you gonna do? They obviously played more of In Rainbows than I would have liked, (i think maybe 8/10 songs) but they were nice enough to play at least one maybe two songs from most every cd so that was cool. They even threw a couple of new songs in there, but I couldn't really tell if I liked them or not.