Thom Yorke

“Thom Yorke looks like a dashboard hula dancer on speed!” This is what I’m yelling into my friend’s ear as we sit seventh-row, dead-center while Radiohead blasts the Boston Skyline with one of its nine new tunes, “Bangers and Mash,” a rock-infused, drum-driven distant cousin of the band’s characteristically electronic-laden soundscapes. My friend nods in agreement, and screams back, “You’re right—he does look like Dr. Evil’s son, Seth Green!”

Given the volume’s intensity, it’s useless to correct him. All I know is that the band’s harmonic vibrations could alter the flight path of migrating birds—and that the little white boy from Oxford can freaky dance.

Before I begin windmills on my air guitar, the menacing Chicken Little strains of Hail to the Thief’s “Where I End and You Begin (The Sky is Falling In)” start bleeding through the speakers. Add the artsy angles and security-camera quality of the live-video feeds on the 10 trapeziums hanging behind the band—plus the ambient melancholy wafting through the tent like dry-ice fog—and Yorke’s mirrored image fuels some seriously creepy disconcertment. Before I decide whether to raise my lighter or run for cover, someone hurls a pair of socks on stage.

“I was really hoping for a bra, Tom Jones style,” says Yorke without missing a beat. So the Oxford white boy also has a sense of humor.

And therein lies the rub—how is it possible for someone constantly portrayed in the press as a distant, gloomy, neurotic elitist to be having so much fun twirling and gesticulating around stage fronting one of the biggest bands in the world? For the rest of the show, Yorke effortlessly walks the tightrope between unleashing banshee yowls of feedback into the sound hole of his guitar on “The National Anthem” and taking sarcastic jabs at Big Business. “So I was walking around the venue earlier, and I happened to see the Cadillac VIP. Does owning a Caddy make you a VIP? Typical Clear Channel or whatever they’re called now. ‘I know, we’ll change our name and now no one will hate us.’ Yeah, right,” he says and then launches into “Hail to the Thief.”

Perhaps Yorke’s art and vitality come not from the balancing, but from the tension in the tightrope. And did I mention the dancing? At one point I swear Yorke was about to scream, “Now is the time on Sprockets when we dance!” Whether he’s deadly serious or merely engaging in subversive tomfoolery, fans and critics alike can now search for an explanation by dissecting Yorke’s ?rst solo album, The Eraser (XL Recordings). Fortunately, I have plans to meet with Yorke in the morning, so I stop analyzing and start dancing.