THE music industry’s paranoia over piracy may intensify, but for Radiohead that’s someone else’s problem. The Oxford quintet have long recognised the efficacy of using one’s fanbase as a sweaty focus group on which to try out new material.

And if this results in a flurry of file-sharing between their more ardent followers, then so be it. In Radiohead’s case, the illicit exchange of MP3s has fed the frenzy rather than dampened it.

So, currently out of contract and with nothing on the release schedule, Thom Yorke’s band commenced their latest UK tour using crowd-pleasers — among the best, a clutch of well-received tunes from 2001’s Kid A and the euphoric oil-can funk of Where I End And You Begin — as bait with which to lure us into the new.

Enthused by the prospect of unseating our expectations, it was with relish that they delivered the UK premiere of Bangers And Mash — a collision of dystopian Motown beats and Colin Greenwood’s sinuous Roxy Music-style bassline, which saw frontman Thom Yorke singing from behind a small drumkit.

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Background

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• Radiohead at Olympia, Dublin

• Radiohead at Edinburgh Corn Exchange

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Radiohead at MEN Arena, Manchester

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Radiohead have long been mining pop gold from places other bands wouldn’t think of looking and a brace of other new tunes suggested that they’re not about to stop now. Nude was a scratchy, esoteric nocturne that saw Yorke turn in a superb, soulful semi-falsetto. For a minute the hitherto unheard 15 Steps sounded like a mess of sluggish beats and clapping, until Jonny Greenwood chipped in with the sort of mellifluous guitar melody one might more commonly find on old Nigerian pop records.

Indeed, it will be a source of celebration to early Radiohead fans to learn that Greenwood seems to have re-emerged from a period of ambivalence towards his guitar. An enduring pleasure of watching Radiohead play is the vastly different approach that he and rhythm guitarist Ed O’Brien have to their instruments. On the right, the professorial Greenwood, seemingly on a lifelong mission to retreat into his instrument, all the better to understand its infinite possibilities. On the left, the outgoing O’Brien, for whom a stage is like the open window of a speeding car to a dog. And in the middle, Thom Yorke representing a symbolic line that the two seem fated never to cross.

But of course, Radiohead never got to this point by assiduously sticking to the plot. And in the middle of the anthemic Black Star, when Greenwood gazed out at the vast 19th-century ballroom and walked over to O’Brien’s mike to help out with unprecedented backing vocals, it seemed like a small but significant signal. >

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