Gowanus Lounge Musical Interlude: Last Night's Radiohead Show

Okay, so it has nothing to do with Gowanus or Brooklyn, but Gowanus Lounge is driven this morning to say a little something about last night's Radiohead show at the Theater at Madison Square Garden that we were lucky enough to score a ticket for in the first row of seating behind general admission when they went on sale and disappeared completely in minutes. (Thank you Ticket God.) Although GL would personally have wished for more material from Hail to the Thief, our personal Radiohead favorite, the show's two-dozen songs were incredible and it was great to hear the six new songs the band performed. (There are some excellent recordings of both the shows and the new material available. Including a soundboard-quality recording of the Amsterdam show in May. You know where to find them.)

Amusingly, every critic to review the show was seated in the row behind GL, so for the entire show, we could glance back and see people scribbling furiously in their notepads. It was like viewing a precision group note taking exercise. (Oooh. Looks like the guy from the Times is writing a lot down during Videotape. Is this good or bad?) Suffice to say that if a beam had fallen on that row, the entire New York City daily and weekly newspaper music writing world would have been obliterated in one fell swoop. (Except for the guy from the Post, who somehow ended up many rows back.) We also heard some interesting gossip about who loves his job and who has a "maniac boss" and how music coverage is being cut back and how editors keep asking the writers to write less, but we won't name names or publications. It would be wrong.

From opening with You and Whose Army through the superb final encore of How to Disappear Completely and great new material like Arpeggi and Videotape, Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood and Company put on a very, very good show. Some photos of the gig are available through Gothamist on Jen C's flickr set--better than what I managed on my cell phone camera. The only disappointment was the lack of Karma Police in last night's set. This means that if you're lucky enough to have a ticket to tonight's show, you will get to see them play it. Radiohead is actually varying their set list every night on this tour (which they are undertaking on their own as they are currently between record labels--we picked up a lot of excellent gossip about this, too, last night.)

GL is certain that this made for a more musically interesting night than the One Hanson opening in Brooklyn, even though we are sorry to have missed ACORN protesting Magic Johnson.