Radiohead side-project The Smile brought space station jazz to Midland

July 25, 2023

Brock Wilbur, Daniel Fuchs,

Thom Yorke must have a big ole soft spot for Kansas City.

The British rock(-adjacent) legend always makes sure his solo and side project tours swing through KC, even on very, very limited hops across the pond. Obviously, there are practical sales reasons to do so. Everyone around us was from Wichita or further into the Midwest, having made the trip to pay pilgrimage to the mad king of making noise. Most everyone at Wednesday’s Midland show for The Smile made mention of fond memories for when Radiohead played last across the street at T-Mobile (not that it was called that at the time) and for his last few rounds at Midland—appearing as both a solo artist and as Atoms for Peace.

The Smile, his latest project, features drummer Tom Skinner and his Radiohead cohort Johnny Greenwood, bouncing around instruments. The return of Thom and Johnny playing guitars instead of endlessly tweaking knobs on various synths isn’t a return to the era of guitar rock that put the band on the map, but it did make for a more joyous evening than we were expecting.

Opening act Robert Stillman took the stage at Midland, armed with only a saxophone and some electronics. In one, 40 minute long ambient electronic song, the solo musician started the room with looping bird noises and eventually built into delightful cacophony, hitting a spot perfect for a Radiohead opener—somewhere betwixt a groove and an antagonistic soundscape. Stillman would return to stage throughout the evening, adding extra horn ‘umph’ to select tracks from the headliner.

The Smile took the stage with little spectacle but were met with overwhelming gusto from the room. After a slow piano opener with “Pana-Vision”, Yorke greeted the crowd as a roadie tossed a guitar over his shoulder. This was the first of many raucous applause outpourings mixed with an almost sports-like frenzy of shouts. At first, my group thought this might be simply Kansas Citians thrilled to see the world mega-stars from Radiohead gracing our local stage. Organically, we soon embraced what those in the front crowd soon came to enjoy.

Playing the entirety of debut album A Light for Attracting Attention, alongside new tracks from their forthcoming release and even a Yorke solo track, there was little to point to here as being truly transcendent. These are very good songs with a somewhat loose structure performed competently. There was nothing on stage that approximated either rockstar hijinks nor technical gusto—little here that you could even describe as a “guitar solo” despite the guitar presence. So what inspired such hootenanny from the crowd?

Honestly, it was just wild to see Thom Yorke having fun.

I’m not sure Yorke processes joy like the rest of humanity. He seems like an advanced alien being, and I’m not sure to what degree he works to convey that genius versus whether he’s actually from another planet, but that does mean the creator embarks on a lot of artistic projects that love to be cold, othering, and despondent. Since The Bends, the man has sung about being the human equivalent of a copy of a copy of a facsimile, or buzzing like a fridge, and projects like Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes certainly saw him xeroxed into oblivion—both in concept and in performance.

It then tracks that The Smile would become so jarring. The organic, living filament of the performance was that of three friends jamming out in a basement. Even if that did employ a degree of cello-bowing an electric bass through a row of effects pedals, there was an overwhelming humanity to the proceedings. The single laptop on stage remained closed throughout most of the show, and interstitial freak-outs or freedom in exploring a song betrayed a lack of click tracks behind the scenes.

Radiohead isn’t known for being loose. This was loose.

For two musicians who have often expressed their disquiet with the amount of pressure placed on their work—starting from a point where their career seemed defined by one profanity-laden single—the lack of expectations on this new project certainly helps allow them to feel free to perform nightly jazz as interpreted from inside a space station, without worrying that anyone is gonna scream “Play Creep!”

And that joy was worn warmly on the faces of the band members. Whereas Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes was somehow early in being the perfect pandemic-era project, full of laptop blitzkrieg and meditations on loneliness, The Smile is the perfect post-pandemic sound—the result of musicians living out the sheer joy of live performance.

It’s weird to see Thom Yorke happy. Feels good as hell, though.

Setlist
Pana-Vision
Speech Bubbles
The Opposite
A Hairdryer
Waving a White Flag
Under Our Pillows
We Don’t Know What Tomorrow Brings
Colours Fly
Thin Thing
Skrting on the Surface
Teleharmonic
Read the Room
The Same
The Smoke
You Will Never Work in Television Again