10. Like Spinning Plates (Live)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGWSy1YnhNI Artist: RadioheadAlbum: 'I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings'Year: 2001 There's a song for every band that you should listen to - everyone raves about it - but you'll get around to it some time. For me, I spent £50 on a poor view of Radiohead, because I love them that much, and I assumed I knew the backcatalogue backwards. But then Thom sat down at an upright piano, alone, adjusted his microphone as casually as you like, and just belted out 'Like Spinning Plates' like I'd never heard it before. The lights formed a curve that arced towards the left, and they shone a deep red. Thom caressed the piano into a tune of major seventh chords, poignant flicks and flourishes, and when the chorus floated up to our seats right at the top, the very top, where we could only make the tiniest of figures, it rung around the arena as if it was the last chorus ever written. That might as well have been it for choruses: they weren't gonna get much better from 2002 onwards. The album version is unsettling, whirring and madly exciting. It's alien and brilliant. But the live version, best heard on 'I Might Be Wrong', is stunning for all the same reasons that any of Radiohead's songs are. But especially because it was that good, and they didn't even bother putting it on a record. They saved it as a treat, for ignorant people like me, to discover on the blessed occasion of witnessing them live. And that's most kind of them.