Why is live at the Astoria 1994 peak Radiohead?

A weird situation where Vegetable and Ripcord get a bigger applause than Fake Plastic Trees and Street spirit fade out.

The early 90s "three guitar attack" going strong.

Jonny absolutely nailing every guitar line (the take of Iron Lung that night was so good its what they used on the LP).

A great performance of Pop Is Dead

all in all mid 90s is peak Radiohead. They were best as a guitar band. It allowed the songwriting to shine through better. The better songs from post-2000 era (Motion Picture Soundtrack, True Love Waits, Nude etc) were all written in the 90s anyway.

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Wrong.

Where is your argument? what is peak radiohead in your opinion?

Kind of agree with you OP. Kid A and Amnesiac were brilliant records but I can never shake the feeling that that's just not the kind of music Radiohead should be making. I feel like the band felt the same, subconsciously, seeing as they mostly returned to more melodic and rock-rooted songwriting from Hail to the Thief onwards (with the exception of TKOL).

Thom Yorke has to be one of the greatest writers of melody of his generation. Pretty much every one of their 90s tunes, even forgotten album tracks and b-sides, is driven by a strong, earworm vocal melody that seems destined to be belted out at an arena or in a festival crowd. Then you consider the songs they didn't release at the time, like Lift and Man of War, which were strong enough to be lead singles for any of their albums. Thom seemed like he was an unstoppable machine in this period. And he still has that ear for melody, he shows it off every now and then, even on his solo albums, and in particular on In Rainbows. But for whatever reason he isn't as interested in seeking out those melodies as he once was. And I think that's a shame when he's so good at it.

And then there's Jonny Greenwood. Who is undeniably a fantastic musician and guitarist in any format. But the sheer aggression he had in the 90s could rival any guitarist of the alt-rock era. You watch live performances from that the time and it's like he's exorcising some demons the way he goes at his strings. Again, it's a real shame he hasn't done pretty much anything of that sort post-2000. A few songs here and there, Bodysnatchers comes to mind, utilize some of those meatier guitar riffs, but really for the most part he does nothing like what he did on the first 3 albums. And that's a serious shame when he's so good at that more aggressive style.

totally agree with you RE: Jonny. While his only "solo" that really comes near being a solo is on Maquiladora (another mid 90s b side as good as most bands A side material), his general playing and "layer guitar" that he adds to, e.g. the verses of Black Star or Iron Lung, or his frantic octave-powerchording on Creep, Just or Anyone Can play guitar, is almost like song-length-soloing.

As for Thom consider that between 1993 and 1997 he wrote:
Creep, Fake Plastic Trees, No Surprises, Just, Iron Lung, Street Spirit, Let Down, Karma Police, Paranoid Android, Exit Music, talk show host, lucky, manowar, Lift, true love waits, motion picture soundtrack, Nice Dream, Sulk, the list goes on.
Plus other very underrated songs like Pearly.

As much as someone might enjoy TKOL or AMSP you just cannot argue that writing the sequence of songs above (which, btw, is not exhaustive) in such a short space of time is simply amazing. Pound for pound, probably better than noel gallagher? And given that Noel defined an entire generation, that is seriously impressive.

I also really like the aesthetic of mid-90s Radiohead . The neurosis of OK Computer was not quite fully fledged, but was hinted at, in a way art school hoes of the 21st century could only dream of. The yellows and reds everythig was steeped in, this sepia blaze (look at Pablo honey , Drill EP, Itch EP, My Iron Lung EP, The Bends and all related single releases from this era to see what I mean).

Its just comfy.

Plus, just really fucking good guitar playing, from all 3 of them.

There's been a lot of retrospective love for Pablo Honey recently. People go in with really low expectations from what gets said by everyone but are coming out realizing it isn't that bad.
A bit like Roger Moore s James Bond era, people are approaching it with low expectations and an open mind, and are realizing "hey this isn't all that bad. It's better than what we get nowadays"

>Pound for pound, probably better than noel gallagher?
I would say so yes.

Speaking in terms of popularity, 90s Radiohead suffered from being a tad ahead of their time. Their early career spanned the exact same years as Oasis's did. They were trying to make a style of music that was very much not in fashion in the UK at that time. The Gallaghers were pushing that whole angle of being "anti-grunge" in terms of ethos, and bringing back the cock-swinging image of the rock star who loved being famous and very much didn't want to kill himself. Obviously, that wasn't Radiohead. And then you had Blur/Albarn pushing the "anti-American" angle very hard on those first few albums. Thom-&-co being disciples of R.E.M. and the Pixies, it just didn't wash. During The Bends era they were definitely more popular in the US for this reason, they could barely get a hearing in the UK press and every single they put out was getting slammed by the NME (who curiously have spent the past 20 years worshipping those very same songs).

The Bends could have been a #1 album with a #1 hit single in a different era. Thom's voice was another offputting factor at the time. It sounds normal to us now, and in the early 00s when Coldplay and Travis and Keane were knocking about it was THE way for a British rock band to sing, but in the mid 90s people thought "who the fuck is this gaylord singing in a girl's voice about how sad he is?" Definitely that put a barrier up preventing Radiohead and Thom getting the respect they deserved for those songs.

Yes they were basically a grunge band. Just is about Kurt Cobain, and Thoms 1993 long hair and LP mixed by Slade & Kolderie who did Dinosaur Jr.

That level of criticism they got only seemed to make them work harder and become even more perfectionist. It seemed to blow them out after OK Computer, though. What we get with Kid A onwards is almost like PTSD.

My Iron Lung, too, is basically a rip off of Heart-Shaped Box. Little descending plucked riff followed by low-low-high low-low-high distorted riff.

youtube.com/watch?v=13vXsf0_gN8
In this video two guys mash up My Iron Lung and Heart Shaped Box. There used to be a better mashup vid than this of it on Youtube but Radiohead are quite good at getting their stuff taken off youtube.

They had to reinvent from that grunge styling. They were never fully grunge of course, in the way that neither were Smashing Pumpkins. They were both always more complex and cerebral than grunge was.
I guess that is why, post 1994-95 as grunge died off, Radiohead and Pumpkins had continued success and other grunge acts did not.

>My Iron Lung, too, is basically a rip off of Heart-Shaped Box. Little descending plucked riff followed by low-low-high low-low-high distorted riff.
Thought I was the only one who heard that. I always thought it might have been an intentional choice. That since My Iron Lung is written about Creep, they were kind of parodying their caricature as "Nirvana-lite one hit wonders" by intentionally writing this slightly more dissonant pseudo-Nirvana song.

>A weird situation where Vegetable and Ripcord get a bigger applause than Fake Plastic Trees and Street spirit fade out.
Maybe it's because the audience had never heard Fake Plastic Trees and Street Spirit before?