“They sound like you”
Personal reflections on the cusp of Radiohead’s live return
This is the second of two essays celebrating Radiohead’s first tour in seven years. Part one, written mostly in 2017, can be found here.
Back we go to July 10, 2018. Madison Square Garden, New York City. The first of four sold-out shows for Radiohead at that venue. Nine songs into the set, a familiar chiming 12-string guitar line in 10/8 begins. “Let Down,” my favorite track on the band’s landmark album OK Computer, and a song that I’d only heard them play live once before, a couple blocks northwest at the Hammerstein Ballroom toward the end of 1997. That rendition was, frankly, lackluster; this one sparkles. Within a minute or so, I start crying, and I don’t stop until the song is over.
It wasn’t the first time I’d let a tear or two loose at a concert. To name only one other, seeing Paul McCartney play “Till There Was You” at MSG in October 2005 made me rather misty-eyed (a fact of which I can’t say I’m all that proud). But this wasn’t a tear or two. This was full-blown catharsis, out-and-out sobbing of a sort I’ve never done at a music event before or since.
What happened? A many-layered convergence of emotions, rooted in experiences both recent and long ago. I’m going to try and pick them apart now.
Easiest one first: Elation, mixed with the melancholy awareness that things end. I’d waited 21 years to hear in person a live version of “Let Down” that truly did it justice. But wonderful as it was, various signs, discussed in greater detail in my previous post, were already pointing toward the possibility that I might not hear Radiohead play it live again. Or any other song, for that matter.1
Next comes a big one: The passage of time. This was my 12th Radiohead concert. I’d seen them at MSG the first time they played there, in the summer of 2001. And I’d seen them a half-dozen times before that, starting with an unforgettable set at the Mercury Lounge in October ’95. I’d met and interviewed each member of the band over the years, and I’d written about them extensively, climaxing with my book Exit Music, the first edition of which was published in 2000. The music made by these five odd English dudes had been an important part of my life for 23 years. Which meant, of course, that they were now all 23 years older, and so was I.
When you think about time passing, it’s natural to think too about what you’ve lost—whom you’ve lost—over time, and from there it’s not that long a jump into the tundra of grief. Brain cancer had killed my mother-in-law about seven months prior to the MSG show. I mourned her loss intensely and still do. I was also gradually losing my own mother to dementia; I grieved for the disappearance of the Mom I’d known. Life, as it so often does, was turning out to be a letdown. And I just kept hanging around.
Hovering by the wellspring of my tears, running deeper and further than anything else through the inner stew, were two permanently intertwined emotional states: the remembrance of distant pain and an ever-present gratitude. Both had to do with the circumstances of how Radiohead entered my life.
As I wrote in Exit Music, my first meaningful exposure to Radiohead took place in April 1995 while I was vacationing in England. I turned on the television in the London apartment where I was staying and happened to see the band playing “Just” live on MTV. Here’s my description of that moment from the book:
“It was an eye-opening three minutes and fifty-five seconds. The Nirvana and Pixies influences [of the Pablo Honey era] were still there but weren’t as obvious. More to the point were the kaleidoscopic complexity of the song’s structure, the devilish intricacy of its three-guitar arrangement, and the incredible energy of the performance, especially on the part of lead singer Thom Yorke, who wriggled and shook as if a combustion engine were perpetually backfiring inside him.”
Accurate as far as it goes, but none of this really explains why the music was so meaningful to me. The full truth is this: In April 1995 I had just turned 23. I was working toward my undergraduate degree at Harvard while continuing to live with my parents in Cambridge and making some side money as a freelance writer and editor. At the pace I was then going, I would probably have graduated from college the following year. In my spare time I was playing guitar in two bands while writing and recording some decent original music. Not so bad, right? And yet, whenever my mind turned toward thoughts of the future, my body seized up in dread.
The previous year, my father’s health had gone into a steep decline, and he was repeatedly in and out of the hospital for congestive heart failure, either the cause or the result (or both) of a breakdown he’d suffered around the 50th anniversary of D-Day. In January, my first serious romantic relationship had come to a sudden end, for reasons I could (then) barely fathom. The slough of despond I fell into soon had physical as well as emotional consequences. Within weeks I somehow managed to come down with chicken pox, which I’d evaded as a child. Plans I’d already made to go to England with some friends had to be changed; the friends went ahead as planned, but I’d have to join up with them toward the end of their trip and then carry on solo. (I was still picking scabs out of my hair when I got off the plane.)
At the peak of my pox-generated discomfort, I received a phone call from one of my best friends (who wasn’t part of the England trip). He was calling not to check on how I was doing, but to ask my “permission” for something. In short, he wanted to drive down to New York and attempt to seduce the young woman who’d been my girlfriend up until January. This would be a sort of score-settling move, a rejoinder to one of my ex’s best friends, his own errant fiancée, who’d recently announced to him that she’d slept with another one of his friends, four months before they were due to get married. (Surprisingly and unfortunately, the wedding went ahead as planned.) Was I okay with this?
In a haze of illness and confusion, I essentially said, “Whatever, I don’t care.” Only I did care, a lot. I tried to rationalize my continuing to be friends with this immensely inconsiderate person by telling myself that he wasn’t really going to do what he said and make at least three people’s lives more miserable to assuage his wounded ego; he was just in a bad mood and thinking aloud. Many years later, I learned to my great disappointment that he had in fact done exactly what he said he was going to do—and ended up unsuccessful, as I could have predicted. By that time, our friendship had long been poisoned beyond remedy.
Taking all this into account, I think it’s fair to say that I was at a low ebb when I finally made it to England, despondent about pretty much everything. Hanging out with my friends for a few days helped considerably, but then they left and I was on my own in an empty apartment in Emperor’s Gate (just a few doors down from the building that had been John Lennon’s first London residence). I pushed myself to go out and stay out, to keep moving. I spent most of my time walking around the city. On one of my last days there, I walked from John Keats’ house in Hampstead to the graves of George Eliot and Karl Marx at Highgate Cemetery. During the course of that walk, I hurt my right foot. By the time I got back to the apartment, I’d realized that the past week’s cumulative mileage was taking too heavy a toll on my body. That night I’d stay in and rest.
And that was the night I turned on MTV and saw Radiohead play “Just.”
The pain in my foot gradually became worse after I returned home, to the point where I couldn’t walk and had to be laid up in bed yet again. This time, though, it was only for a few days rather than the weeks that had elapsed as I’d recovered from the pox. And by now, I had a copy of The Bends to keep me company.
When my dad first heard Radiohead, he said, “No wonder you like them. They sound like you.” I had to admit there was more than a little truth in that statement. In the band’s constantly surprising harmonies, aching melodies and inventive arrangements, I recognized a kindred spirit. Radiohead was making the kind of music I wanted to make. And the bleak, cynical tone of their songs exactly reflected my own worldview. The future still scared me, but if these guys who seemed very much like me were doing okay, maybe I might end up okay too.
Less than three months after I first put on The Bends, my life had changed dramatically. I moved from Cambridge to New York, from lovelorn college student to senior editor of a national magazine. On the surface, the music of Radiohead had nothing to do with this. But on some mysterious subterranean level, that music was crucial. It opened a door at just the right moment. It showed me that somebody else understood, and that more was possible.
This is why I sobbed like a baby at Madison Square Garden that July night in 2018, in recollected pain and in thanks. And this is why I have a problem with people who say that Radiohead makes depressing music. Because that music has given me new life more times than I can count. Even if it’s only for a couple of months, I’m really glad they’re back.
Update 11/5/25: Radiohead’s first live performance in seven years is now in the history books. And what was the first song on the Madrid night-one setlist? “Let Down.”
Incidentally, “Let Down” makes a significant appearance in Jonathan Dean’s excellent late-October Radiohead profile in The Times. Thom Yorke is quoted as saying that he “fought tooth and nail for it not to be on [OK Computer], but Ed [O’Brien] was, like, ‘If it’s not, I’m leaving.’” O’Brien responds with the comment that he considers it the “emotional heart” of the album. Good old Ed, showing once again why he’s the most likable member of Radiohead. He also happens to be right on the money.