Phil couldn’t be doing with Radiohead and their worried robots, but things changed on Glasgow Green.
Radiohead: they always sounded like pre-war phone-sex. Not as a band, you understand, but as a word. They are one of the few bands I felt were named after the kind of person who might like them. Oh, so far, I am writing this before I have seen them, and for me Radiohead are an exercise in not disliking something you don't totally love.
They are an exercise in artistic tolerance that I can use to measure where I am. So sometimes I think there is only the true wailing sound of ultimate music that has no words, just the flying labyrinths of all wonderful noise, and so all the complicated extras of emotion and its need to be noticed is inappropriate and I can’t be doing with Radiohead and their worried robots.
So then I did see them in a massive marquee, the marquee Mark they called it, a happy Marquee, not the marquee de sadness. It was down at Glasgow Green at an instant festival site. Nothing there last week then bing, a mini- festival tonight, with the finest gravel I have ever experienced, so fine and yet absorbent and with a density so remarkable that, even though it was
in chips smaller than those tiny magnets you used to amaze the iron filings, you could build a little
hillock for your little friend Gillian to stand
on and help her see a
bit of the band’s
lighting rig.
6 THE lIST 3-19 Oct 2000
THEY SOUND EXACTLY LIKE ANGST MADE BEAUTIFUL, LIKE CONFUSION SORTED OUT AND back. THEN SET FREE TO TANGLE AGAIN.
For up the back at the right was where we were. There was a section up the front for the first 2000 callers to get into which I didn't realise as I weaved the ziggy weave all the way from the back through to the very front of the back - daring to incur the over-the-shoulder demi-wrath of those who appear to have pre-booked that bit of gravel — to a mysterious fence that meant you could cheer the backs of the people a bit in front over the no-fan's land patrolled area, people who were crazin at the very back of the front, and still in front of us at the very front of the
I lost everyone I came with immediately and for a while was doing the insane thing of looking away from the band for my friends which always looks a bit pretend because its authenticity can never be checked yet which no person would rightly ever bother to do.
Meanwhile Thom 'thumb' Yorke and Radiohead are playing everything you could ever want to hear, all those screamin’ melodies and plateaux of emotional essence, they sound exactly
like angst made beautiful, like confusion sorted out and then set free to tangle again. People love it and rejoice. There are three screens here at the back from cameras on stage that let us distant ones feel closer, and actually get a closer look than even the ones at the front of the front. The band are high up which is where a lot of the heads are going in acts of adoration anyway and then they would get these digital rewards and it felt totally like the Radiohead fans felt as close to this music, as close as the cameras on stage, as close to the sound of the emotions from the stage as anyone could. There is a lovely moment when Thom makes an error, messes up a chord and has to start again. Even in this simple 'oh fuck' there is a world of him that people love and they cheer and clap and love their moment of even further throughness.
I find my friends again, I re- rejoice, look around, see the heights of the tent, drink very cheap LiebfrauNun 'White' 'Wine', move with the music and feel the feel. I wish to use the power of the pun without the naff relish often involved and say that Radiohead are a
band like FM and AM are a band, and they have width and everyone there was tuned in and the reception was amazing.
ROISI’. ‘.'(( IOSKE
Famespotting Kananu Kirini
Kirini as Miranda with Vanessa Redgrave at The Globe
So who's she when she‘s at home? She's a young girl, whisked from London Academy of MUSIC and Dramatic Arts (LAMDA) straight into the prestigious role of Miranda in The Tempest at the Globe, playing opposite Vanessa Redgrave’s Prospero. And when she’s at home, she's in a tiny Village near the Kyle Of Lochalsh.
Her name doesn't sound Scottish. Born in North Berwick and raised in Kyle Of Lochalsh With a Kenyan dad and Scottish mum, she’s more conscious of her Scottish identity than you, Enoch. 'The only language we learned at school was Gaelic and the first two plays I did were in Gaelic, too,’ she says. ’The only instrument I learned to play was the pipes. Being black and Scottish, I really do feel Scottish. When I was fourteen, I was sent to boarding school in Perth, and that was very English, I started to feel embarrassed about my accent. They kept trying to get rid of it at college, too.’
That was at LAMDA? Don’t get ahead of yourself Before that, she played Lady Macbeth in Scottish Youth Theatre's production at the Cottesloe.
Then LAMDA? No, then a year abroad, including a Visit to her separated dad in Kenya, then LAMDA, and a waitressing jOb at the Groucho Club. While most theatre graduates spend their first few years after graduating struggling for bit parts and mice- overs, Kananu was poached by Mark Rylance at the Globe before she'd finished the degree.
What's she doing here? Romeo And Juliet at the Lyceum is what, playing Juliet opposite Gary Collins' Romeo, And she has strong Views on the SUbJGCI. ’You don’t have to be a girly girly romantic thing for it, It's an amazmg part. If the character isn’t amazmg, it’s yOur fault, since the words are there, and they’re great. It translates to the modern day and it's a really passionate story It's got everything to grip people.’
And what's next? Well, she's bright, talented and pretty, so the world's her lobster, but in the meantime you can soon see her at the Royal Lyceum Christmas show, Cinderefla.
fl Romeo And Ju/ret, Roya/ Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, 24 OCt-~ 78 Nov
DONAL I) (OOPER