Rolling Stone Australia — July 2017

RADIOHEAD

JUNE 28, 1997 GLASTONBURY

1997 AMERICAN TOUR

SLEATER-

KINNEY

CROWDEDHOUSE

¥TEN YEARSafterthereleaseoftheir

debut album, Crowded House front-

man Neil Finn had made the decision

to call time on the band, aware that

drummer Paul Hester’s departure in

1994 had changed the internal dy-

namic,andthatthenewmaterialhe

was writing belonged elsewhere. Ini-

tially he thought the band’s last show

shouldbeasmallbuskinggig,but

then-manager Grant Thomas had

grander plans. With Finn and bass-

istNickSeymourjoinedonstageby

Hester and onetime member Tim

Finn, and with an undercard featur-

ingCustard,YouAmIandPowder-

finger, Crowded House bid farewell

(forafewyearsatleast)infrontof

100,000 people (though some esti-

mate the crowd to have been closer to

250,000)onthestepsoftheSydney

OperaHouse.Beginningwith“Mean

To Me” and concluding 24 songs later

with an emotional “Don’t Dream It’s

Over”,theshowwas,asFinnsaidon-

stage, “more like a celebration than

a funeral”. “It was a profound way to

go out,” he said years later. ROD YATES

NOVEMBER 24, 1996

FAREWELL TO THE WORLD

July, 2017 RollingStoneAus.com | Rolling Stone | 75

¥ THE SCENE RADIOHEAD encoun-

tered at 1997’s Glastonbury Fes-

tival looked more like a war zone

than a concert. It had been pour-

ing rain for days, forcing the 90,000

fans at the remote fi eld in Somer-

set, England, to live like refugees

in a monsoon. Two stages sank into

the mud, and some fans actually

came down with the World War

I-era malady trench foot. Early in

Radiohead’s set, Thom Yorke’s mon-

itor melted down. The lighting rig

was shining directly into his face,

meaning he couldn’t see in addi-

tion to being unable to hear himself

play. “If I’d found the guy who was

running the PA system that day,”

Yorke told a journalist, “I would have

gone backstage and throttled him.

Everything was going wrong. Every-

thing blew up.”

¥ N EARLY 1997, I the most exciting

new band in rock was a trio of young

women driving their own van across

the country, with only their friend

Tim along as a roadie. “We’d get to

the club,” recalls Sleater-Kinney

singer-guitarist Corin Tucker, “and

the sound man would be like, ‘Wait.

You’re the band? You? You girls?’ ”

But playing songs from its album

Dig Me Out, the group bulldozed the

staid indie-rock scene with unbridled

punk-rock exuberance. “In Atlanta,

10 women got onstage and took their

shirts off and danced with us,” says

co-leader Carrie Brownstein. “I don’t

know if they’d ever felt that freedom

before, and I was really proud to pro-

vide the soundtrack for that.” JON DOLAN

Weeks after releasing their ca-
reer-defi ning album, OK Comput-
er, it looked like Radiohead might
fl op during a headlining set at the
world’s biggest music festival. In-
stead, the chaos inspired one of
the band’s greatest performances.
Rage poured through Yorke all night
long, giving extra fi re to eight songs
from OK Computer, plus nearly all
of The Bends – and even a crowd-
pleasing version of their first hit,
“Creep”. It was a transcendent per-
formance, even if Yorke didn’t re-
alise it at the time. “I thundered off -
stage at the end, really ready to kill,”
he said. “And my girlfriend grabbed
me, made me stop, and said, ‘Lis-
ten!’ And the crowd were just going
wild. It was amazing.” In 2006, Q
magazine voted it the greatest con-
GETTY IMAGES, 2 cer t in British histor y. ANDY GREENE

THE

EVOLUTION OF

RADIOHEAD’S

STADIUM-SIZE

ART ROCK

May 27, 1994

This version of

“My Iron Lung”

ended up on

The Bends.

July 4, 2000

A sneak preview

of Kid A that left

Berlin stunned.

June 17, 2006

At Bonnaroo,

playing early

versions of In

Rainbows songs.