It is difficult, as George Orwell almost wrote, to establish any relationship between the price of gigs and the value one gets out of them.
Tonight I hold a golden ticket in my hand; an oblong piece of paper worth £49.50 or, once booking fees and perhaps postage are factored in, nearer to £55. That’s just a pound short of what Britain’s unemployed youth (one million and counting) have to live off each week while looking for work. It’s the price of five new albums from an indie record shop, or 10 from the internet. It’ll get you just 10 small glasses of red wine in Camden (as I learned to my horror moments before the gig), or 10 whole bottles in a supermarket.
This discrepancy between the value of a thing and its price floats to the front of my mind again midway through Atoms For Peace’s set, as I watch Thom Yorke twirl and bob across the stage, dripping with sweat and wearing a one-sided grin on his face. This is a picture of a man having a lot of fun. To his left, Flea’s chin is performing a little dance of its own while its owner lunges and shimmies through the dry ice. At the back, Nigel Godrich is head-banging as hard as a studio-bred musician dares, while drummer Joey Waronker and percussionist Mauro Refosco gleefully pull the whole caboose forward with their compacted clatter.
On the other side of the barrier stand the owners of these golden tickets. We’re having fun too – shaking around, nodding our heads, occasionally stretching an arm skywards – but there’s no doubt whose jolly it is tonight. Thom Yorke fans may be used to paying through the nose for their transcendental gig experience (tickets for Radiohead’s last tour were £70 a pop), but that’s a three-hour greatest hits bonanza. Regardless of its members’ pedigrees, Atoms For Peace can’t come close to that kind of performance yet.
The set starts promisingly enough, with the band diving headlong into Amok opener ‘Before Your Very Eyes’ and barely pausing for breath as they rattle through album highlights and stray into Yorke’s solo album The Eraser. The speed is frantic, drums and bass are to the fore and dancing is the order of the day – but the heavy-handed approach hammers out the delicacy of Yorke and Godrich’s writing partnership. Moody synth lines and subtle harmonies are inaudible through the din, effectively stripping out the emotive hooks that are Yorke’s signature dish.
The two encores bring a change of pace (and an improvement in sound quality) as they tackle sparser material, including Yorke on the piano for his UNKLE collaboration ‘Rabbit In Your Headlights’, but the final three songs are the strongest, with ‘Atoms For Peace’, ‘Black Swan’ and a Kraftwerkian stutter-funk interpretation of Radiohead B-side ‘Paperbag Writer’ making for a superior send-off.
We shouldn’t begrudge Yorke his moment of giddy abandon – after all, he spent the first 10 years of his career being professionally miserable – but you wouldn’t charge your mates an entrance fee to your own birthday party, would you? The price wouldn’t have mattered if Atoms For Peace could offer that ecstatic spectacle, the kind Bruce Springsteen reportedly provided for three hours in Leeds the night before (for £65, incidentally). But aside from the smile on Yorke’s face, there’s was little out of the ordinary about this excruciatingly overpriced night out.
