Can't get you out of my Radiohead

It must do your head in being in Radiohead and not being Thom Yorke. Not only does Thom get to be greedy with extra letters in both of his names, he's also the only one anybody recognises as being in Radiohead, except perhaps for the tall skinny one called Jonny I think, who leaps in super slow-motion like a girl into a carvan in the video for Street Spirit (Fade Out). Stuttery, squinty, winky Thom IS Radiohead, and with one doleful squinty wink of his sad glad-eye, all doors open and impediments evaporate. Imagine being Jonny Whats-his-name  leaping all slow-motioniny through the doors of The Ivy and being told before you hit the ground that you can't come in because you don't have a booking and nobody knows who you are. Jonny would press his slow-mo-nose up to the glass and inside Thom would be scoffing and squinting with Damon Albarn, Richard Ashcroft, Debbie Harry, Chris Martin, Chrissy Hynde, Mark Knopfler, Nick Cave, Jarvis Cocker, Tom Petty, Trent Reznor, Sting, Gwen Stefani, Michael Stipe, Jon Bon Jovi, Florence Welch and Huey Lewis. Michael Hutchence would be hanging around somewhere as well. Jonny would plead with the maitre d and perhaps play the 'rain down' bit of Paranoid Android that he wrote on an  ondes martenot but to no avail. He would be tossed in slow-motion back onto the street in winter with an empty tummy and nothing to do but breath on the glass and write rude messages to his lead singer, like 'Thom Dorke!, or 'At least I can read music!', or 'Ronan Keating thinks you're a muppet!'. The rest of Blur, The Verve, Blondie, Coldplay, The Pretenders, Dire Straits, The Badseeds, Pulp, The Heartbreakers, Nine Inch Nails, The Police, No Doubt, REM, Bon Jovi, The Machine and The News, INXS and JD Fortune would all be doing the same and the window would look like an angry version of the wall outside Abbey Road studios, except be on glass and written with angry fingers in angry breath and nothing to do with The Beatles except for the fact that Radiohead like The Beatles can sell out Shea Stadium in less time than it takes Jonny to leap into a caravan...much less time.

That would do your head in as well. I've done a few shows and one of the absolute joys is waiting for that email everyday to reveal you've sold no tickets. The emails usually come though at around 5pm and I'd be circling and wagging like a laptop dog, salivating and slobbering and ready to tear the email open with my teeth to reveal the rows of '0's for all four shows in a 30 seat venue with no airconditioning and a much bigger poster for the show after yours above the urinals. The disappointment never lasted long and only led to an dance exponential increase in expectation, hoping against hope the next one would contain a mystical '1'. 0,0,0,0,0,0.....1! Never has binary been so erotic and exciting. Someone somewhere has spent $16 on a concession ticket to my site-specific one man show featuring an ear-splitting burst of pop music, defecation and aggressive masturbation.

Radiohead don't get to experience any of that. Thom just gets on Facebook and sends a message to his friends like, 'Hey guys, doing a world tour. Come to my show!!!! We'll have a drink after', or 'Creep has had over 23 million views, that's almost viral (I reckon). Come to the show and see stuff in for reals life yo!', or 'Hey World - Looking for some late night madness? Come along to the biggest stadium nearest to you. They'll be performances by heaps of artists. Probably quite a bit of drinking and it's only a gold coin/koha for entry.', and before Thom can poke Jonny they've sold 1.9 trillion tickets and 2.8 million FB groups have been set up asking for extra shows or whether they can possibly make it down to Invercargill 'cos there's heaps of Radiohead fans down there and they'd be sure to show Thom and the other guys a good time.

Social networking. My old flatmate Michael Legge tweeted about the death of someone he made up and then The Guardian did a story about it because it was trendy. I was there in the 90's when Michael put his knob in the mouth of his girlfriend's dog to cheer her up...his girlfriend, not the dog, but that happened before Twitter so nothing appeared in The Guardian about it. In the library where I'm writing this, I saw Amanda Palmer and her hubby Neil Gaiman perform and read to over 400 people and the only advertising they did was a couple of tweets. Just amazing. Here's a pic of the concert.

Can you see me? Just treat it like a game of Where's Greggy? Given up yet? OK, I'll put you out of your misery. I'm the one on the right checking my emails on my phone to see if anybody has purchased a ticket to my one-man show that I wasn't even doing. What an arse. Who goes to a ninja gig and checks their emails on their phone? If I had been tweeting about being at a gig I heard about via a tweet that might have been cooly ironic, but no, I was...bloody hell, the guy next to me in the supposedly silent room of the library has put on headphones and is listening to The Party Rock Anthem at an eardrum piercingly loud volume while he sends his emails. Who does that? The whole bloody library has free Wifi, why can't he FRO and go and blast his LMFAO SOFP? Oooooh...maybe's he's been reading over my shoulder as he's just petulantly slammed his laptop shut and stalked out of the room. He's left his Macbook here. If it was a PC I could change his screensaver to read something hilarious like, 'You're a dork', or 'I can hear your shitty music', or 'Greggy thinks you're a muppet', but Apples are Greek to me.

Where was I? I don't know. This whole post is rambling. Oh hell, he's come back so I'm going to finish here without checking for typos and spelling eras. I didn't even get to talk about what I've been doing for the last few months instead of writing insightful crap like this. Have you missed me?