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Alert! Radiohead Are Not Robots, They Are Humans Who Make Mistakes and Laugh About It

Come hither, to see Thom Yorke respond to a bum note by giving the most incredible full body side eye ever recorded in history.
Emma Garland
London, GB

Last night, Radiohead played London's Roundhouse, marking their first string of live shows since 2012. The tour sold out so fast tickets ended up on Viagogo at £1,400 a pop faster than a basic could say "I wonder if they'll play 'Creep'?" All of which is to say: Radiohead are back and people really, really want to see them live.

And why wouldn't they? Radiohead are a flawless band. Regardless of whether or not you like their music in the sense that The Bends is your go-to commute album, Radiohead are so talented, so accomplished at what they do, that they seem less like people who write songs about technology and more like computers who developed enough self-awareness to dislike themselves. Have you ever looked deep into a guinea pig's eyes and tried to figure out what it's thinking? Listening to Radiohead is like that. They are so proficient it makes me uncomfortable.

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As such, it's difficult to imagine any member of Radiohead doing regular people things like wiping hummus off their chin or fumbling over which emoji to use. As far as I was concerned, Radiohead go home at night, plug themselves into an outlet, and wake up at precisely 6:03 AM because their internal alarm clock told them it was time to process some information about climate change into a song.

But, last night at their first gig in four years, the band—as well as performing for two and a half hours and finding entirely new ways in which to enthrall and surprise people—genuinely fucked up. They made a mistake. They actually made a mistake, and then they reacted to that mistake with emotions. Radiohead, for the first time since Thom Yorke called Spotify "the last desperate fart of a dying corpse," humanized themselves.

Performing "Nude" from In Rainbows during their first of two encores, Jonny Greenwood mistakenly played a harmonica instead of the ondes martenot (LOL what an amateur!!!), which Thom Yorke responded to with the most incredible full body side eye I have ever seen in my life. Then, he turns to the audience and points at Greenwood as if to say, in an extremely Larry David voice, "Can you BELIEVE this guy?!"

You can watch video documented evidence of Radiohead being human below. The proverbial mistake takes place at the 0.42 mark.