One-two-punch. They play “Bloom‰” and “15 Step.‰” You can‰’t fight it. The night begins.

Thom Yorke, grizzled and with a ponytail, two decades away from the angsty young man who wrote “Creep,‰” now dances like a madman. He jigs up and down the stage with glee, reaching out for the audience, looking every part the rockstar. Between songs he addresses his followers with small talk, chatting amiably, with none of a rockstar‰’s distance. He jokes and dances and you can tell he is having a great time. When he sings, his voice hits notes so clear and inhumanly pure that you wonder that he has just been chatting with you. The everyday man is silent and the divinity with in him rings out amongst its devotees‰’ raised cell phones.

They play “Idioteque.‰” “Ice age coming, ice age coming, let me hear both sides, throw them on the fire.‰” Sing like the planet‰’s dying. Dance like tomorrow ain‰’t coming.

In fact, the whole show was for dancing, as the entire band play the songs in their grooviest incarnations yet. The dual drummer effect as well as occasional auxiliary electronic percussion by other band members creates a constantly dynamic bed of rhythm which cannot be denied. While of course many concertgoers are reserved, my friends and I rattle and shake to the beat. There are no specific moves, only a constant current of electricity which electrocutes us into strange and exhilarating shapes.

They play “Lucky.‰” Waves of guitar sound wash over the awed faces, drowning them in catharsis. The song still feels fresh, punishing, poignant and wounding, like a revelation of feeling, even though it‰’s fifteen years old now. It is timeless.

The two drummers look like clones, both bald and happy, grooving tightly with each other. The effect is amusing and a bit unnerving. Colin Greenwood, the constantly smiling bassist, lays down brilliantly subtle bass lines, providing bump when bump is needed, and otherwise fluidly anchoring the entire soundscape with his own deep, unique melodies.

They play “There There.‰” In my head I laugh about how the only thing more reassuring than nineteen thousand people singing “just cause you feel it doesn‰’t mean it‰’s there‰” is nineteen thousand people singing “we are accidents waiting to happen.‰” And then I sing too. It doesn‰’t matter. The song is too good not to.

The crowd is fundamentally heterogeneous- men and women, all ages, all colors. Two generations can claim Radiohead as their own, but many more have tapped into their music. There are people five, ten, twenty, thirty years older than me, and all of them know all of the words.

They play “Kid A.‰” Nursery bells plink throughout a wash of warped electronic strings and droning rhythm, and Thom sings through a vocoder. I cover my eyes and feel like an embryo, floating in the womb, still attuned to the natural rhythm, the music of life itself.

Jonny Greenwood, resident multi-instrumentalist genius, seems bored, flitting around his corner of the stage on what seems like dozens of different instruments- guitars (without or with a violin bow), drums, electronic drum pads, keyboards, synths, and weird 20th century electronic instruments. He never settles on one- even on “Paranoid Android,‰” between screaming guitar solos – the most rock n‰’ roll moment of the concert – he is at a Fender Rhodes keyboard, playing fluid lines of a completely different energy level. His constant restlessness to find the perfect instrument to play the perfect line betrays his expertise at his own music, and you can feel the irrepressible creativity bursting out of his wiry body and limp black hair.

They play “Give Up The Ghost.‰” The masses are silent with reverence.

They play “Paranoid Android.‰” The lights are blinding and the sound is deafening. The flailing crowd courses with the song‰’s fear and aggression, but turns it into a celebratory thing, a wild triumph that we all relate to.

Ultimately, that‰’s what Radiohead are about. They take the horror and decay of the world surrounding them and turn it into music, music so good that most people enjoy it thoroughly. Like all the best composers, writers, and artists of modern history, they can turn the intangible fear of the unknown into something we can listen to, memorize, and love differently than we could ever love any person.

We love the people in the world because they distract us from the harsh realities of life. Yet the music in the world is what takes these realities head-on and sublimates them into something great, something that people of all stripes can enjoy. There‰’s something in it for everybody, whether the power of the lyrics or their delivery, the brilliance of the music, or the entire package. Even Radiohead themselves benefit from it. There‰’s no more of the depression, paranoia and angst that marked their first decade. The tricky frustration of personal politics that marked their second decade is still present, but muted, blurred by the band‰’s enthusiasm for the music itself, their dancing and their joy in the constant creation of the new. In it they find their salvation. And so do we. They played 23 songs, more than two hours of music. It still felt criminally short.

They play “Pyramid Song.‰” Thom Yorke‰’s gigantic chords and Jonny Greenwood‰’s eerie atmospherics create an ethereal underworld brought out visually by the misty blue-green lights. When the drums hit for the final groove and Thom‰’s divine voice echoes over the landscape below, my eyes close, my body dissolves and floats up on the sound waves, through the cracks between the molecules of the arena roof, and out into heaven.

By Jesse Paller