Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Radiohead: In Rainbows at Malahide Castle

If you truly "get" music, or, more accurately, it gets you . . . stalking you, grabbing you, informing you, and most accurately, reflecting you . . . it is especially difficult to write about it. "Getting it" is not a learned skill, and perhaps not even desirable.  If anything, it's a disease. It occupies your headspace, your iPod memory, your consciousness, and your Visa bill. 

If you are stricken with the disease, and you are lucky, you don't also need the live show counterpart. You are perfectly content to get your fix online, through your television, through your speakers, or through your headphones, avoiding the cost, the smoke, the crowds, the parking, the spilled beers, the frequently bad sound, and the general frustrations that are attendant to the live music experience.

But if you have the disease in its worst form, your addiction necessarily includes the live show experience. And I'm sorry, my friend, this is the disease in its worst form. Terminal. 

Last week, that very form of the disease sent a friend and I to Dublin, Ireland to see Radiohead at Malahide Castle. Unable to begin to put it to words, I won't attempt to describe what transpired.  But it happened. It all happened. In one beautiful perfect late afternoon in front of a castle, the absolutely perfect show happened. Despite twenty-five or thirty thousand other fans bearing witness (we were in the very front!), I wouldn't believe it if I hadn't been there myself. After hundreds of live shows in the past 40+ years, there simply is no close second.

Oh, and Radiohead's new record, In Rainbows? Just before Radiohead took the stage, rain fell for five or ten minutes-- just long enough to make the brightest, clearest, most perfect rainbow . . . make that TWO rainbows . . . appear over Malahide.  They took the stage In Rainbows.  It really happened.


Radiohead at Malahide Castle, Ireland from Mark Need on Vimeo.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I grinned from ear to ear just reading this post and watching the clip you put together. Can't imagine what that was like for you.

Anonymous said...

Awesome video - felt like I was there!

rodan said...

mark.... WOW what a freaking amazing video! seirously. and obviously what a mind boggling experience.