Radiohead live at the Quarry of St Triphon – Live Report

After nearly two months off the road, Radiohead are back on stage tonight in Switzerland. The band are playing a pretty unique venue – the Quarry of St Triphon in the Canton de Vaud. Tonight’s show is the first of the rescheduled European shows that were canceled earlier this summer after the accident in Toronto.

Tonight’s lineup includes both Caribou and Four Tet so it should be a great night. We’ll do our best to bring you the selist live but it might be a bit difficult today. We’ve also recently updated the 2012 Tour Songs page to include every show of the year; check it out if you’re a stat nerd. And, as always, follow us at @RadioheadLive for all the latest setlist info.

Unfortunately, Four Tet had to cancel tonight but Thom stepped in and DJ’d for a while.

Setlist
01 Lotus Flower
02 Bloom
03 15 Step
04 Weird Fishes/Arpeggi
05 Kid A
06 Morning Mr Magpie
07 There There
08 The Gloaming
09 Separator
10 Pyramid Song
11 Nude
12 Staircase
13 Paranoid Android
14 Feral
15 Little By Little
16 Idioteque
—-
17 Climbing Up The Walls
18 The Daily Mail
19 Myxomatosis
20 Reckoner
—-
21 Identikit
22 Everything In Its Right Place

Part 1 of Coachella Festival Wraps Up With Few Surprises

Damon Winter/The New York TimesA member of Pulp performing on Friday at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio, Calif. More Photos »

INDIO, Calif. — Well, in the end it’s a business. But so it is at the beginning, and in the middle.

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An ambient question about the three-day Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, which ended on Sunday — or did it? — was whether the knowledge that it would be repeated exactly one week later in the same place and in the same order might alter the minute-by-minute feeling of it. You know, make it less special. Take away its aura. Does Coachella have an aura? It did once.

At large destination pop festivals, impressive surprises are experienced as acts of generosity: a balloon rising into the vast desert sky, a three-hour set. This is what unites large numbers of people and makes them feel innocent. Not the weekend’s quick-stop onstage guest appearances, from macro (Rihanna with Calvin Harris, Usher with David Guetta) to micro (the weirdo rapper Gonjasufi with the Los Angeles D.J. Gaslamp Killer).

Moments like those are as much for celebrity blogs and YouTube clips as they are for music fans. They don’t make you, standing in the crowd, feel particularly innocent. This year more than ever, the sets felt like jobs with a bit more self-promotional energy. I don’t remember a lot of shared awe. Will the surprises be better next weekend? Who knows, but it’s unlikely, with much less news media present.

This festival was founded 12 years ago on the premise of indie rock, which is, or has at times been, an art of innocence and skepticism — in other words, ideals. It’s grown out of that to become a festival of popular and semi-popular North American, English-language noncountry music, a megamart of sound for college kids.

It’s strong on Grammy winners, breakout acts from South by Southwest and the CMJ festival from a year or two ago, and, at this point, second-tier reunions. And dance music, which is likely to alter Coachella’s future more than any of the genres it has flirted with over the years. Aesthetically, it’s almost uncontainable, which is neither good nor bad; it’s just breadth, Spotify made real.

The oxymoron of a unique cultural event set to rerun was, obviously, a way to sell more tickets — 75,000 more — without making the festival too crowded. And that plan worked: both weekends sold out, and the crowd felt at capacity but no more. (Except in the dance tent, where many came to stay, and late arrivals squinted to watch house D.J.’s like Sebastian Ingrosso, Avicii and Kaskade.) The security felt nonintrusive and often invisible, as it should; this is a calm audience.

I saw violence only once, during the Death Grips’ set on Friday. That band, from Sacramento, has a great idea: nonidiomatic digital dance beats (sort of Southern hip-hop, sort of reggae, sort of hard-rock) with Zach Hill’s hypercreative, improvised live drumming on top, and Stefan Burnett’s mostly unintelligible yammering raps and chants. It’s bad-dream music, strong and strange, with dirty rock riffs occasionally drifting in: Pink Floyd’s “Astronomy Domine,” Link Wray’s “Rumble.” It’s music that can start fights, and it did.

The two-part festival is a big deal for music on the West Coast, and not just at the festival site, the Empire Polo Club. It means that a lot of these bands play other club and theater shows in Los Angeles before or after the festival weekends — many of them also booked by Goldenvoice, the festival’s promoter — and some of them run up to San Francisco in between the shows.

In 2012 the headliners didn’t define the festival or, on the face of it, lure concertgoers to spend money specifically here — as opposed to, say, Sasquatch or Lollapalooza, in May and August, each of which has about two dozen of the same acts as Coachella in its lineup. Most of the names in the biggest type were acts that have been seen a lot in recent years, in touring circuits and wherever else: the Black Keys, Swedish House Mafia, Bon Iver, Radiohead.

Anyway, innocence. You saw it projected onstage rather than felt by the audience, as part of the music’s artifice, in band after band with cool eyewear, retrospective yearnings and the trebly sound of Fender Jaguars and Jazzmasters: Girls, Yuck, EMA, Ximena Sariñana, M83, the Shins, Real Estate and even the R&B singer Frank Ocean, beset with sound problems, singing beautifully and moving diffidently.

It was left to Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg, on Sunday night, to work the surprises. They performed wall-to-wall hits from 10 to 20 years ago with a pile of guests: Eminem and 50 Cent; Wiz Khalifa as rap’s present; the Los Angeles rapper Kendrick Lamar (who performed “The Recipe,” a new Dr. Dre production) as its future; and, as its past, a full-body holograph of Tupac Shakur, digitally pacing the stage and appearing to ask Coachella what was up.

Coachella Festival Announces Lineup

The Black Keys, Radiohead, Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre will headline the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in April, according to the event’s Twitter page.

The annual festival, held in Indio, Calif., will feature two weekends, April 13-15 and April 20-22, with the same acts.

Arctic Monkeys, Bon Iver, David Guetta, Florence and the Machine, and Girl Talk are also scheduled to appear.

Followers of the Coachella Twitter account received news of the lineup on Monday. Providing a link to the list of acts, the post read simply, “psst… pass it on.”

Last year’s festival, which lasted just one weekend, featured Kanye West, Arcade Fire and the Strokes, helping to coax 75,000 people to buy three-day passes. Goldenvoice, the festival’s promoter, reported $23 million in ticket sales. In May, organizers said the festival would expand to a second weekend.

The Twitter account said tickets for April’s festival would go on sale Friday.

Victim of Radiohead Stage Collapse Identified as Drum Technician

The man killed when a stage roof collapsed Saturday afternoon just before a Radiohead concert in Toronto has been identified as Scott Johnson, 33, from South Yorkshire, England. He was a drum technician for the band, the BBC and The Globe and Mail reported. Mr. Johnson also worked for Keane, another British band.

Three people were injured in the collapse, which occurred shortly before 4 p.m. Saturday on a temporary stage that had been erected in Downsview Park. An unidentified 45-year-old man was taken to a hospital with a head wound that the police said did not appear to be life-threatening. The two other men were treated for minor injuries.

The accident took place just an hour before the gates opened. An estimated 40,000 people were expected to attend the concert that night, which was to start at 7 p.m.

Inspectors from Ontario’s Labor Ministry were combing the wreckage to find what caused the superstructure over the stage, which was designed to serve as a roof and to hold lights and other apparatus, to come crashing down onto the stagehands who were setting up instruments, microphones, amplifiers and other equipment.

Though there were several similar accidents at festivals and concerts last year, most of them involved high winds. The weather on Saturday in Toronto was fair with light breezes.

Radiohead Postpones European Shows

The stage collapse that killed a Radiohead crew member last Saturday in Toronto also destroyed the band’s sophisticated light show, forcing the British group to postpone seven concerts in Europe over the next two weeks while repairs are made, the band said on Thursday in a statement. That means Radiohead will skip a swing through the Italian cities of Rome, Florence, Bologna and Codroipo, a two-night stand in Berlin and a stop at Canton de Vaud in Switzerland. It will resume the tour in Nimes, France, on July 10.

“The collapse also destroyed the light show – this show was unique and will take many weeks to replace,” the band said. “The collapse also caused serious damage to our backline, some elements of which are decades old and therefore hard to replace.”

New dates for the postponed shows will be announced on June 27. The Ontario labour ministry is investigating the accident during which a massive superstructure holding lights over the main stage crumpled and fell, killing a roadie, Scott Johnson, and injuring three other stagehands.
Investigators have been combing through the wreckage and have requested blueprints of the temporary stage, which had been erected in Downsview Park in Toronto. The main focus of the investigation is Live Nation, the giant concert promotion company behind the event, but three other companies hired to put on the show are also being scrutinized: Optex Staging and Services, Nasco Staffing Solutions and Ticker Tape Touring LLP, The Toronto Star reported.

Ticker Tape Touring is controlled by the band: the guitarist Jonnny Greenwood; his brother, the bassist Colin Greenwood; the drummer Philip Selway; the guitarist Ed O’Brien; and the singer Thom Yorke are listed as board members. It remains unclear what the touring company’s role was in erecting the stage or ensuring its safety, Canadian investigators told The Star.

Mr. Johnson, 33, of Doncaster, England, was an accomplished drummer who made a living as a stagehand on rock tours, tuning and caring for drums. He had been hired earlier this year to manage the drums for the “The King of Limbs” tour, The Star reported. The day after Mr. Johnson’s death, Radiohead posted a letter on its Web site: “He was a lovely man, always positive, supportive and funny; a highly skilled and valued member of our great road crew. We will miss him very much. Our thoughts and love are with Scott’s family and all those close to him.”

A Dance-Heavy Coachella Begins in the Desert

Damon Winter/The New York TimesCoachella started under gloomy skies, high winds and scattered showers in Indio, Calif.

INDIO, Calif. — This year’s edition of the three-day Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival begins on Friday, to run through Sunday. It has changed in at least one respect that the average festival-goer will barely notice: the entire lineup will repeat one week later, with identical order and set times. Both weekends have sold out; attendance is expected at around 75,000 per weekend.

But if you live in the Los Angeles area, and if you couldn’t buy the sold-out $285 tickets to either weekend, you may feel a difference. Around and in between the concerts, Coachella bands will flood the West Coast; Goldenvoice, the festival’s promoter, also promotes club shows around Los Angeles, and its April calendar shows many of the festival’s draws redirected into the area’s clubs and theaters. (If you’re nowhere near, you can live-stream many of the concerts on a dedicated Coachella YouTube channel.)

As goes the world, so goes this festival: Coachella has moved heavily toward dance music of all kinds. Giant billboards on Highway 10 approaching the festival advertised the upcoming electronic-music festivals Hard Summer and Electric Daisy Carnival, as well as the forthcoming tour stops of Avicii, the Swedish DJ who will close out Coachella on Sunday. Beyond that, across the weekend, there are sets by Swedish House Mafia, Afrojack, David Guetta, Nero, Calvin Harris, Alesso and Sebastian Ingrosso: enough for someone staying in the dance tent to pretend that indie rock, once this festival’s bread and butter, never existed.

But in other places — and as usual for Coachella, which has been a high-profile market for indie-rock tastes since it began in 1999 — there will be reunions of 1980s and ’90s groups to feed the news cycles, including Pulp, At the Drive-In, Firehose, Mazzy Star and Refused, the Swedish punk band. (None are earth-shaking, but I find myself looking forward to them all.) And if you’re looking for an index of last year’s underdog heroes of hip-hop and R&B, here you go: Frank Ocean, the Weeknd, Asap Rocky, Kendrick Lamar, Azealia Banks. All in one sweep. Not bad.

Since you asked, the main-stage headliners are Radiohead, the Black Keys, and Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg. Never before have the names in the largest type seemed so unprovocative. That feels significant. I’ll be thinking about that as I run around here (and file ArtsBeat dispatches) over the next three days.

‘Radio and Juliet’ at Skirball Center - Review

Here’s the pitch: a ballet of Romeo and Juliet. Sure, that’s been done before, but this is contemporary, set to songs by Radiohead, sure to appeal to a youthful demographic. And get this: Juliet doesn’t kill herself. The whole love story comes through her flashbacks. This thing is stripped-down, chic, just Juliet in a corset and six men in suits without shirts. It doesn’t take up your whole evening, either. An hour and you’re out.

Radio and Juliet From left, Matjaz Marin and Tijuana Krizman of Ballet Maribor in Edward Clug's staging at the Skirball Center on Friday.

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Judging by the young crowd that filled the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts at New York University on Friday night, the choreographer Edward Clug has found a formula for selling tickets. The “Radio and Juliet” he created for the Slovenian company Ballet Maribor has been touring since 2005. It’s a hit, but more of a programming success than an artistic one.

Mr. Clug’s choreography is detailed and sharply defined. Its most distinguishing feature, however, is twitchiness. Bodily extremities flick and jerk so frequently that it seems the entire cast has a nervous disorder. Perhaps that’s by design, to illustrate modern anxiety, but it becomes silly.

In a dance to Radiohead, the twitches can be partly justified as punctuation, acknowledgment of the beat. Mr. Clug also takes a robot voice from the band’s album “OK Computer” as the excuse for a mechanical solo for Juliet, adroit but gratuitous.

Occasionally the lyrics speak to the situation (Mercutio dies to the track “Bulletproof ... I Wish I Was”), but mostly the music is there for atmosphere. It works best in the fight scenes, where the speed of Mr. Clug’s style locks into a song’s sense of contained agitation finally erupting.

As Mercutio, Christian Guerematchi steals the show. Small and dark, he’s the most fluent dancer on the stage, now slinky, now explosive. His dying twitch is sad because it means he will dance no more.

Tijuana Krizman’s Juliet isn’t Shakespeare’s great soul but a girl with some spunk. During a love duet with Romeo (the lanky, accurate Matjaz Marin), she bats at his jacket, one of several moments between them that ring true. Rather than tragic romance, Mr. Clug emphasizes the awkwardness of adolescent attraction.

Despite the framing and the gender imbalance, Mr. Clug’s reduction retains the basic outline of Shakespeare’s play. His deviations are invariably diminishments. This Romeo is passive, a mere bystander to his friend Mercutio’s death. Repeatedly, he is replaced at Juliet’s side by the other men, an odd motif that has the effect of making Juliet look like a tart. Instead of poison, there is a forbidden fruit, a ridiculous lemon. And the only upshot of Juliet’s survival is video of her moping in a bathtub, fully clothed.

A flashback of Romeo’s death is the ballet’s final scene. He just lies there while Juliet writhes through one more solo. The ending took me by surprise: That’s it? It’s over? Only in retrospect could I admire the economy with which the production, skipping forward in blackouts, raced through its material. But I should have guessed how it would end. The last thing Juliet does is twitch.