Our Johnny is the Only One Dancing in Time: Chapter 15
An occasional series of possibly true scenes from a perfectly normal life. Let's call it faction.
Chapter 15: Put This Blanket On Your Head
(If you’re new to the book, you might want want to read the other chapters first. Links to each chapter are at the bottom)
The Magician has been struck by an excellent idea. How would it be if we all went to New York to grab a bite to eat, maybe a few drinks, and pop in to Radio City Music Hall to see the last night of the Radiohead OK Computer tour?
This is the sort of offer that The Magician conjures up effortlessly from the ether, like an alchemist casually announcing they’ve managed to turn a Mr Kipling’s cake into a solid gold bar. We had become acquainted entirely by phone and fax, when across a three year period without meeting even once she had managed to persuade me to book acts ranging in quality from Longpigs, three times, biggest fee paid £400, sold out shows two, through to Cecil, £50, once, I genuinely cannot remember a single thing about them. Somewhere in among these dozens, if not hundreds, of bookings, The Magician and I had realised that our actual taste in music, as opposed to her beleaguered pleading phone calls to ‘please, just find them any old slot you can’, neatly coalesced and collided somewhere in that magic spot between The Divine Comedy and Radiohead, very often occupied by ex-members of the American Music Club. Or maybe PJ Harvey.
The Magician worked underneath the auspices of The Man in Black, a notoriously social individual who seemed to be out at everything all the time, but quite plainly didn’t like people very much. I’m understating it. I once found him hiding in the alleyways of Brighton during The Great Escape conference and music industry networking event carrying a briefcase. He proudly opened it to show me that the contents were a fake moustache, a wig, and a big hat ‘in case anyone spots me’. Despite this wish to remain as far away as possible from any actual human contact. The Man in Black had found himself at the very top of the agent pyramid, representing probably the biggest names in alternative rock music. This appeared to be a job he thoroughly objected to, so to avoid actually having to do it taking up too much of his time he had employed The Magician to do it all for him. This was a job at which she proved so good that his empire continued to expand in all directions which was obviously a great annoyance to him.
I had finally met The Magician in real life after The One and I had taken the leap and moved to London. We agreed to meet for a curry and a legendary Divine Comedy gig which took place for an undisclosed reason at York Hall in Bethnal Green, a well known home to Boxing and Yoga classes but a place with no pedigree at all for hosting live music events. That evening had concluded at 4am when The Man in Black had insisted we should leave Soho’s WAG Club, marched us down the street into a XXX Video Club, whereupon he knocked forcefully on a completely blank white wall. This caused a previously unseen slot to be pulled back, a hidden door to open, and staircase down to what can only be described as a bacchanalian orgy to be revealed. Our six cans of lager were served to us out of some dustbins onto a wallpapering table by a strikingly handsome bearded fellow with the largest breasts in the western hemisphere. The One observed that the evening had possibly peaked and we had left The Magician and The Man in Black to spend the rest of the evening with the dungeon inhabitants, with whom they seemed deeply acquainted.
Among the plethora of internationally famous acts technically represented by The Man in Black, and therefore whose concerts largely happened because The Magician made it so, was the aforementioned Radiohead. We had attended the first London date of their world conquering OK Computer tour together in September 1997 at the Astoria, and now some 110 shows and 9 months later the album promotional live activities will be ending with two shows at the legendary Radio City Music Hall on 17 and 18 April 1998.
Radio City Music Hall is a bucket list venue if you’re a live music fan. Nicknamed "The Showplace of the Nation", it was designed by Edward Durell Stone and Donald Deskey in the Art Deco style which was popular at the time of its construction. It was built on a plot of land that was originally intended for a Metropolitan Opera House, and opened on December 27, 1932, as part of the construction of Rockefeller Center. The 5,960-seat venue has a history as a theatre, cinema, and finally concert hall. It was designated a New York City Landmark in May 1978, and its one of those places you have to have been too if you’re serious about understanding the history of live music venues. The final night of the Radiohead tour is also one of the hottest tickets in the world, but The Magician waves her arms about in the mysterious way only she can make happen and produces two passes, backstage artist access after the show, plus invites to the end of tour party somewhere downtown in a secret location. We find the cheapest flights on offer, book a room we don’t really expect to sleep in, and we are in.
We arrive too late on the Friday for the first show, which turns out to be a blessing as festivities for that event have apparently concluded at some time close to 9am in the morning, but at 5pm on the Saturday we receive a text from The Magician saying she’s just woken up so it’s time for breakfast, which she has arranged will take place in a local eaterie near Grand Central Station named Tequila! Tequila! Tequila! There’s a clue in where this evening is heading in the name of the restaurant it’s starting in.
The waiter arrives, we hilariously ask if there is any Tequila available, so he steps away for a moment and returns holding a 42oz Margarita. And three straws. Attached to the side of this bucket is a plastic dog painted in rainbow colours which you get to keep if you finish the drink, so we order a second one because we don’t want to take him home on his own. We arrive at Radio City suitably sober for the sort of easy listening experience which OK Computer performed live presents, and are handed a raft of passes which seem to permit you to do just about anything. Deciding not to be in the band for the evening, The One and I take our seats and settle in for a night of very serious entertainment about the state of the world.
There’s a diary film of this tour which you can watch, called Meeting People is Easy. If you have any preconceived ideas about the glamorous nature of rock and roll touring, I’d strongly urge you to give it a watch. It is a salutary lesson in the utter relentless boredom of touring at this level, featuring a band in a state of almost permanent mental breakdown as they shuffle from one poorly researched interview to mind numbingly tedious promo opportunity. Thom Yorke spends the entire 95 minutes looking like he might kill someone if they ask him how he wrote the songs just one more time. Phil Selway will later go on to say that he doesn’t think it was a very accurate reflection of the tour as a whole, which he felt had its much lighter moments. I’m going to back Phil on this one, because we are about to witness one of those moments.
If you’ve not heard OK Computer, or maybe not listened to it for a while, it’s worth you revisiting it to get an idea of the atmosphere around the record. It’s a bleak, dystopian, record, struggling to breathe out its tunes, which are rejecting any possible tilt towards commerciality in favour of smothering the vocals with distortion and playing the guitars backwards through a combine harvester. It is not, and I want to be clear on this point, a jaunty pop record. However, tonight is the last night of an arduous and difficult year travelling across the world, and so this possibly explains why the band literally skip onto the stage, grins abounding, and gleefully announce ‘Last night of the tour!’ before producing versions of the the record and their back catalogue which seem to have been injected with the spirit of Russ Abbot’s I Love a Party with a Happy Atmosphere. Thom and the lads are in a very, very good mood as the reality of going home sinks in. The One, The Magician and I seem to be some of the few inhabitants of the room for who this new approach to the music is perfectly in tune, so we set about a bit of salsa dancing, although our attempts to start a conga meet with some glares.
The gig concludes in a festive style, I seem to recall that there might have been confetti but that could have been the Tequila doing its work. The audience begins to filter out, and it is then that it becomes apparent that the multitude of passes which we have stickered ourselves and hung about our necks have resulted in the security team assuming we must be married to the members of the band. We are personally escorted through dark hallways, up tiny staircases, across odd bridges which appear to be above the auditorium, until finally a door is pushed aside and we are presented to the backstage area, a lush double spaced room with various sofas scattered about and its own bar area into which somebody has loaded the contents of a small brewery. And a vineyard. Possibly a distillery too.
The people in this area are as follows.
The members of Radiohead.
Their tour manager and one member of the crew whose job it is to open drinks on the side of a counter.
The Magician.
The Man in Black.
The One.
Me.
Neil Finn.
Eddie Izzard.
This is not so much the backstage area for doing meet and greets and shaking a few hands as it is the band’s extremely private space in which they can discuss who fluffed the chord change in Airbag. Despite this, we are greeted enthusiastically, which will often happen if you find yourself somewhere you really shouldn’t be but no one knows what to do about it. We know the Tour Manager a bit, he also acts as their gardener and is really quite pleased when we are fascinated by his plans to make their kitchen self sufficient by the end of the millennium. We keep ourselves busy for about an hour making a valiant attempt to drink as much of the rider as possible, falling about 200 people short of even making a dent on it, and then the Tour Manager says ‘Could you possibly help me out?’
He needs to get the band downtown to their own secret after-show. He has transport arranged to do that, but the rear exit to the venue is thronged by fans and he doesn’t want them following the van and finding out where it is. He’s had an idea of how he can get them out of the venue, and needs our assistance to make it happen. He’s going to bring another vehicle round to a fire exit on the other side of the venue, he just needs a distraction to keep the fans at the rear of the venue occupied while he gets the band members in it. He looks meaningfully at us. We look at each other. We consider the toxic amount of Tequila which has interfered with our ability to make a decision in the same county as anything resembling sensible. And then we heartily agree that YES… we will be Radiohead for an evening leaving the backstage of the Radio City Music Hall.
We are escorted to the rear load out doors of the venue, where the head of security gives us a briefing which, to be honest, we don’t listen to very much because we are too busy laughing. A team of security assembles around us, four on each side, and blankets are produced and thrown over our heads.
“The van is about 50 metres in front of you” we are instructed. “Your job is to run in a straight line as fast as you can and throw yourselves into it.”
As previous chapters will have testified, I never became a famous musician. But at about 1am on 19 April 1998, approximately 300 American fans of Radiohead screamed their adoration at me as the door of the venue were thrown wide and, escorted by our own personal protection unit, we ran out onto West 51st Street, past the venue security, between the barriers, in front of a dozen or so of New York’s finest police officers bracing back a crowd of frenzied well wishers. I think we managed about 35 metres of this run before one of the blankets fell off and the cries of “Thom, we love you” faded to a series of ohs and ahs and at least one “who the fuck is that?” It seemed a bit pointless to get in the van, so we just fell to the ground laughing.
Rock stars often say they feel oppressed and hounded by this sort of attention, but I’d highly recommend doing it once if you get the opportunity. It’s quite an intoxicating feeling, probably made more tolerable both by the large amounts of Tequila we had imbibed prior to it happening and the fact that the screaming was not aimed at us but at the five members of Radiohead, Neil Finn and Eddie Izzard, who had been able to nonchalantly slip unnoticed out of the side door and were now headed downtown.
We bundle ourselves into a taxi and go to meet them. It is 1998 in New York and I am a long way from my perch up the ladder by the side of the bar of the Holy Toilet.
Read the previous chapters of Our Johnny is the Only One Dancing in Time here: