October 24th 2024 - Songs To Take Off To

For Thom’s 2024 solo tour, I kept up a diary to help myself remember it all. I’ve compiled that here, complete with photos and videos taken at each show. I make no apologies for the level of excitement and indulgent hyperbole -- it was a once in a lifetime experience.

My plane taxis down the runway as How to Disappear Completely plays, and I think; this is a song to take off to. As we pull away from the ground, Thom's voice soars.

This is the beginning of six unexpected shows I'm attending across Auckland, Melbourne, and my own home turf in Sydney. Wryly, I think this is the easiest travel I've ever done to see this musician. Another part of me is in awe that it's real, and I'm deeply suspicious I may be one of those coma patients asleep and inventing an ideal reality. Is he really here, in my remote part of the world? I just have to go with it.

Somewhere in the early afternoon, between continental plates, I'm flying over the ocean listening to a recording by a top bloke called Keith of last night's Christchurch show. Thanks Keith. I can only hope my amateur taping skills get a result like this one.

I've curated a few live reddit threads in my time, but the scramble last night to try to pull together an accurate setlist, with almost zero information from inside the event, was hilariously maddening. It's quite a list, and there was no predicting where it would take us. It feels new, and bizarre, and brave, and that is everything I admire about Thom.

I order some red, and stare at the blank shore of white on blue out of my little window as Suspirium plays. In the background a baby cries. Thom sounds pristine, and I am hovering in this state of disbelief -- this is really happening.

It's been years since I caught some of the festival shows in Europe, and further back to all of the others. To those shows with Flea, to all of the good memories queuing, and travelling to brand new countries where I see familiar faces from the last tour and feeling welcomed into this weird and sacred church of ours. It is good to be doing this again, as if each unexpected setlist revelation is undoing the damage of the lockdown years, where I drifted away from all of it. And myself.

I have a job interview for my own job tomorrow morning, and I'm sincerely glad I booked a nice hotel to do it from. Having received this news while at the airport, I am left with no time to prepare and can only trust I know my shit. Going through a restructure while on road for Thom Yorke is really the ultimate backdrop of corporate dystopia. My future is uncertain.

It feels as if each of the turning points of my life have been marked by this music, for the past two decades. I may be going into this one with an uncertain future, but also with an ultimate reassurance that these songs will be there on the other side.

We are approaching the north island, and I realise a year ago I flew home from here in the wake of a natural disaster. Storms hit Auckland, flooding the airport. We made an emergency landing in Wellington, I slept on a bench in the airport cafe with a few hundred lost souls, and found another way home.

I'm thinking about this as the recording of How to Disappear Completely from last night plays, thinking about how I need to keep moving. I need to keep moving.

Close to landing, the new Mark Pritchard song rips through my earbuds. It's fucking loud and it's fucking amazing. This makes me sit up straight in my unreclined economy seat. I saw our homegrown Presets a few weeks ago -- a show I'd been waiting for since a COVID cancellation in 2020 -- and this is easy to imagine tucked into that set. Maybe they'll do me a solid and remix it.

None of us really know what these next few shows will be like. What else will he play? I am happy enough to trust in Thom, and enjoy the ride. Already I'm bursting with the need to make music, to write, to take photos of the sky. Hello, here's what went missing these past years, and I'm glad of it's return.

Thom is soaring over the clouds on the word 'away' and the notes stretch out in my mind. I suppose I am a rabbit in the headlights -- a good reminder to not stand in oncoming traffic, but hop away and keep going, forward. Wherever it leads.

One of these clouds looks like a feather. 

I'm waxing lyrical here, and I'm sure it's amusing for whoever might see it -- but this is me. Thom doesn't give a flying fuck, and neither will I -- I'm glad to have put myself together again. Whatever happens next, I'm ready.

And then we are landing.

Thom Yorke - 2024-10-23 - Wolfbrook Arena, Christchurch, New Zealand (Audio Only)