Fifteen years ago I made the fateful decision to travel from my home in New York to Berlin to see Radiohead perform. At the time, I worked as a radio producer at the BBC’s New York bureau, and the date on my ticket had yet to acquire its tragic significance: 11 September 2001. Like many other people, that day is seared into my brain: a day of horror, disbelief, anger and sadness, and all of it – for me – forever associated with the sublime music of Radiohead.
Last Sunday, Radiohead were back in Berlin, performing as the headlining act of the Lollapalooza Berlin festival, the date of their show falling on the 15th anniversary of 9/11. I made the trip back to see a band that had provided a significant soundtrack to my life so far, believing this moment would be among other things a point of reflection on that dark day. It seemed unlikely that the band’s famously taciturn lead singer, Thom Yorke, would say anything about that historic anniversary, and yet there always seems to be a heartbreaking line in his elliptical lyrics that says it all. “And it’s too late / The damage is done,” Yorke sings in the recent song Daydreaming. That feels about right to me.
On that late summer’s evening at Treptower Park, the events of 15 years ago perhaps seemed far away, even as the world commemorated. Certainly the mood among the estimated 60,000 people who attended this concert was mellow and positive – a far cry from the heightened, edgy state of alert that defined the 9/11 concert, which took place in an outdoor amphitheatre in Wuhlheide Park. The coincidence of the dates wasn’t missed by the German newspapers, which recalled the 2001 event as a “spooky and rainy night”.
If anyone needed reminding that the repercussions of 9/11 were still being felt, the very location of Lollapalooza Berlin was testimony to that. The festival was supposed to take place on the grounds of the now-defunct Tempelhof airport, where its debut was held in 2015. But in the year since, Germany has welcomed more than a million refugees and, as of two weeks ago, is currently housing nearly 1,500 refugees at Tempelhof, according to several German newspapers. It’s not difficult to make the connection between the legacy of 9/11 and the present refugee crisis resulting from war in Syria and violence in the Middle East.
Radiohead started their set on Sunday with the first five tracks from their newest album, A Moon Shaped Pool. The stage was drenched in red light as the band opened up with Burn the Witch, Jonny Greenwood using a bow on his electric guitar to approximate the nervy col legno strings that open the track. Yorke sings, “This is a low-flying panic attack.” That urgency gave way to the drifting beauty of Daydreaming, and soon we were inside that melancholy ambience – the mystery of music able to change the nature of the air – that is specific to Radiohead.
The atmosphere on 11 September 2001 was of a different order, an extraordinary sensory event in my life. I remember a series of impressions: the walk from the S-Bahn through the dark forest of the park; the rain starting to pour; my awareness of being deep within the former East Berlin, a novelty for me that seemed to add historical darkness to my sense of place; the banks of fluorescent white lights on the stage (my friend commenting that this was a homage to David Bowie’s 1976 White Light Tour); a state of vulnerability and anxiety and, perhaps, guilt over going to a musical event after the horror of the day. If apocalypse was upon us – as many felt – then all we needed was a soundtrack, and who better to supply it than Radiohead, a band whose music charted fear, alienation and paranoia, but also made it OK to feel those things. And here we were, the band kicking off with sampled German talk radio before the raspy fuzz of the bass loop that defines The National Anthem: “Everyone is so near / Everyone has got the fear.”
Thirty-eight minutes passed before Yorke said: “I’m trying not to say anything. Well, what the fuck are you going to say after today? You know. There’s absolutely nothing to say.” After that, the band launched into a ferocious version of Airbag, from OK Computer, Greenwood ripping the opening/closing guitar riff with a vengeance. Was there a sense that the band was out of sorts? Why wouldn’t they be? Then, after the disorienting affect of Pyramid Song, something happened. Yorke said: “So who here doesn’t know about it? Everybody knows what I’m talking about?” Clearly some people did not. “You don’t know what I’m talking about? You don’t know about the aeroplanes in America?
“Somebody tell them,” said Yorke. “I’ll tell you.”
Yorke explained what had happened in New York and Washington DC. There was still a degree of uncertainty about the facts (and in 2001, it wasn’t as if people had iPhones to give them updates). I was already aware of the news, having been glued to BBC World television all day long in a friend’s flat, watching the pictures from New York with disbelief – and here was Yorke talking about it. It was surreal and unsettling. “So … that’s why, you know, things are a little mute tonight,” Yorke says. “I’m sorry about that. This is called Paranoid Android.”
If the crowd was looking for some kind of communion in its fear and anxiety, in its grief and empathy, Paranoid Android was the song that opened the floodgates. By the time the song broke into its hymn-like invocation, with Yorke singing, “Rain down / Come on rain down on me / From a great height,” it was both a lament and a glorious catharsis.
Toward the climax of the concert, Yorke returned to the news, dedicating the song You and Whose Army (albeit in a hesitant manner) to the Bush administration. The playground posturing of the lyrics with their “Come on if you think / You can take us on” line is undercut by the defeated air of the music. There’s nothing triumphant here, but it was a song that perfectly captured the mood of weary defiance. And so to the final encore, Street Spirit, with Yorke’s introduction articulating an unspoken fear: “This is hoping … George W Bush doesn’t declare world war three.”
And fade out again. Fifteen years later, I still recall all the coiled anxiety of that moment. We didn’t know there would be wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as a direct consequence of the September 11 attacks. But we knew there would be something. Of course we couldn’t go home after the adrenaline surge of this epic concert. We walked to a bar, not quite knowing what to make of this strange mixture of uplift and dread, a combination that Radiohead have mastered. As my friend and I walked through the streets of Berlin, it was still raining, but we had already submitted to this. It felt only appropriate after such an invocation. And it afforded us one advantage: the concert posters advertising the Radiohead concert plastered on billboards and walls around the city were soaked through. The glue was wet. This allowed us to peel them off cleanly and roll them up like treasure maps. The black posters bore the image of a weeping devil, with the date – in European format – printed beneath, in bold white lettering: “11.09.2001 BERLIN”. Eventually I framed the poster, which now adorns my living room wall in New York – a prized possession.
Of course Yorke didn’t mention the 9/11 show at the Lollapalooza Berlin concert on Sunday. He was never going to. But it was all there in the songs, which, despite the balmy weather this time around, took me right back to the scene of the most important, emotionally charged gig I’ve ever experienced. At the end of the set, I joined in with the crowd and we sang, “For a minute there / I lost myself.”
