Thom Yorke fucked the club up.

The Radiohead front man brings his own version of brat summer to Aotearoa.

The familiar shape of Thom Yorke – lanky hair, baggy pants, bony shoulders, shuffling feet – stood hunched over on the stage. Surrounded by machines, Yorke’s hands twisted knobs and stabbed at buttons, dialling up layers of throbbing bass and synth rushes into a perfectly punishing crescendo of noise.

The song is ‘Volk,’ from Yorke’s excellent 2018 Susperia soundtrack, and the results were overwhelming, a slab of industrial-strength wattage accompanied by visuals that turned electrical wires into knotted worms. It felt like Kraftwerk was being conducted by Guillermo del Toro. “Play something weird and eclectic next!” joked someone behind me afterwards.

That statement said it all. This is not what anyone was expecting. When Yorke announced his Everything solo tour, it conjured images of a sad man sitting at his piano singing lonely ballads under a spotlight. From Radiohead to The Smile, from Atoms For Peace to The Eraser, ethereal and melancholy is what Yorke does best.

If he’d done exactly that, everyone would have gone home sad and satisfied.

To be fair, there were occasional moments that delivered on that specific demand: set opener ‘The Eraser’ landed acoustic and beat-less, accompanied by videos of Yorke’s face glitching into digital dust; The Smile’s ‘Pana-Vision’ showcased his still-impressive falsetto to perfection; and a haunting late-set version of ‘Videotape,’ one of several moments that had Radiohead diehards on their feet and cheering.

Thom Yorke delivers a club classic at Spark Arena. Photo: Tom Grut.

But those moments were rare red herrings designed to put last night’s sold out crowd off the scent, to hide the real reason he was here. Because, I’m pleased to report, Yorke is having his own version of brat summer, one full of spluttery trip-hop, broken breakbeats and dancefloor-fillers. He came here for one reason only: to fuck the club up.

Those intentions were signalled early, as the skittery ‘Last I Heard (…He Was Circling The Drain)’ morphed into ‘Packt Like Sardines In a Crushd Tin Box,’ Yorke twisting into shapes behind his microphone, trying to move in time with his glitchy beats, giving us a peek into his own warped world, showing us where his head’s really at.

It felt, at times, like watching a mad scientist at work in his lab. This is when Yorke seemed happiest: when the beats were breaking, the synths were swelling, and he could drift between his machines and get lost in the matrix. So we got the spacey electronica of ‘Not the News,’ the warped ‘Cymbal Rush,’ and, in further proof of where he’s really going with all this, a new song, the thumping grime of ‘Back in the Game’.

Any DJ set or dance party needs a climax, and last night had one: a remix of Radiohead’s In Rainbows stunner ‘All I Need’, here delivered with thick bass slabs and tinny high hats, a morose ballad morphing into a foot-stomping highlight, one with so much reverb it rattled the air conditioning unit above me.

The Thom Yorke jukebox in full effect.

With a setlist almost entirely different from the one played in Christchurch on Thursday night, there was plenty here for Radiohead trainspotters and Yorke’s mega-stans. Songs were plucked from almost every project he’s done, including his soundtrack work. Yes, some hits appeared: ‘Let Down’ and ‘Fake Plastic Trees’, both played live for the first time live in nearly 10 years, and ‘Lucky’ for the first time since 2003.

Even so, anyone who came hoping for a repeat of Radiohead’s incredible performance in the same venue back in 2012 may have gone home a tad disappointed. This was something far more challenging, and therefore more thrilling: a dance party with a host intent on cherry-picking from his own jukebox, cutting loose, doing his own thing, getting lost in his own world, and inviting us along for the ride.

Yorke’s doing it all again tonight. You’d be crazy to miss it. My advice? Clear the seats off the dance floor, roll in the smoke machines, fire up the lasers, refill the confetti cannons, hand out edibles at the doors and turn Spark Arena into the dark, dank club he so clearly wants it to be. Then everything truly will be in its right place.

Thom Yorke plays Spark Arena tonight; limited numbers of tickets are available here.

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