“We’ve had an hour’s sleep,” explains Robb Tito, singer with the French Radiohead tribute band Paranohead, shortly before going on stage. “But our dream from day one was to perform in the UK.”
Two hours later, after a barnstorming set that covered the full range and catalogue of one of the world’s best-loved bands, and a three-song encore, he asked the crowd for a group selfie. They roared their appreciation. “Je t’aime,” yelled one local. “We love you too,” the band’s bassist fed back. It was just past 3pm.
The band had played a gig in northern France the night before, caught a ferry, and were on stage at the Half Moon by lunchtime on Saturday.
It was Paranohead’s first ever show in the UK. “Two gigs as Paranohead in less than twenty-four hours,” Robb told Putney.news. “It’s hardcore. We’ve never done that. We’re all very exhausted. I’m concerned with my voice.” He needn’t have been. Ten minutes in, the exhaustion was long forgotten, the band was locked in, trading smiles with one another, when Robb let loose and the room lifted, only returning back to earth when the lights came back on.
Getting to Britain was the point. “It’s a big thing for us,” Robb says. “Big deal; we started the band because we’re in love with Radiohead.”
They got a booking at The Bullingdon in Oxford, where Radiohead come from, decided to do it and then added in gigs on the way. The UK arm will end up costing them money. “We won’t cover the cost,” Robb told us as the band carried out a soundcheck in the background. “It’s a trip to go to the UK together as friends, passionate about Radiohead, and come to their hometown.”
The Half Moon date came together late. Venue manager Phil wanted the band but only had Saturday afternoon. “That was the only slot he had. If it wasn’t for this today, I don’t know when. So we thought: let’s do it anyway.” Putney was glad they did.
They played Bilston on Sunday and play Oxford on Tuesday before heading back to France. “I hope for the best.” Tickets are still available for the Oxford show; your reviewer is seriously considering getting one.
Never meant to be a tribute band
“We were just a bunch of musicians,” Robb says. After Covid they started playing Radiohead covers to give themselves a project. “It’s a great challenge.” As audiences encouraged them, they added songs and hired professional players.
The first proof came at Supersonic, an underground venue in Paris, where they played for two hours to a crowd from all around the world. “It was a validation for us that we are decent,” Robb says. “We could carry the crowd.”
Their home country is hard to play, he notes. Radiohead in France is “like sacred”. “It’s untouchable. And having another band performing this is, no, no, no. It’s not right.” So the work came abroad first. “We got gigs easier in Spain or Portugal, Asia than France.” Crowds in Vietnam were “screaming before we even entered the stage”. “We have to go far. But we’re driven by passion, so we do it.”
Paranohead is not a tribute band in the traditional sense. They do not dress as the band, or try to give you a squint-and-it-could-be-them impression; they just love the music. “I don’t have the same voice,” says Robb talking about Radiohead lead singer Thom Yorke. “I’m not sure it’s going to be received well. But so far so good.” People who hear them find the likeness, he says, “not in the voice, but more in the interpretation”. Radiohead fans, he notes, can be a hard audience. “It’s like they don’t want to share Radiohead.”
Radiohead toured last year for the first time in seven years, and Robb saw them twice, in Madrid and Berlin. The whole band went to Madrid and he found himself studying them during the gig. “I was watching while I was working.” So in Berlin he made himself stop. “Don’t think, don’t worry, just feel.”
Floating in the sound
The songs he likes best to perform with the band, “Myxomatosis” and “Nude”, are the electronic ones, he says, “because I’m immersed in the sound.”
Then there is “Weird Fishes”, possibly the band’s favourite, which builds and builds. “It feels like we are underwater, and we’re just floating in the sound,” Robb says. “You don’t know anymore what is playing. You’re just in it. In the sound.”
That feeling depends on getting the sounds right, and Paranohead began as fans who wanted exactly that. “Do the songs as best as we can,” Robb says of their first covers. Asked whether they try to capture the sounds Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood makes, he points to one instrument: the Ondes Martenot, an early electronic keyboard that Robb says Greenwood plays. It has “no attack”, he says, and a ring on a string that the player slides to imitate the vibrato of a voice. Robb recalls Greenwood saying in an interview that he cannot sing, “but he sings through this instrument”.
So Paranohead’s keyboard player at the time, an engineer and “a real geek, a sound geek”, built one himself. The band took it on stage. On tour in Asia it stopped being reliable. “Whenever temperature changes, the string gets loose,” Robb says. Sometimes in the middle of a show it would “untune completely”, and on a song like “Pyramid Song” the note it played went wrong.
Did that throw him as he sang? “Oh yeah. It’s like an electric shock. Especially in this kind of song, when you’re floating in the sound, everything has to be in tune together.” Radiohead’s own sounds can rub against each other, he adds, but this was different. The instrument has gone and the new keyboard player uses a pad he slides a finger across to do the same job. The toughest part of the band’s dynamics is choosing the setlist. The younger players prefer the later albums; the older players the older ones. One thing they can all agree on though is what it means to them. They have named the tour “the soundtrack of our lives”.
Asked whether a new Radiohead album would come with mixed feelings, more songs to learn, Robb is unequivocal; he would be “the happiest”: “I would love another album. We all do as fans.” Our interview is punctuated by guitar licks and bass lines emerging from the back of the Half Moon as people come and go through the doors; a growing number of people arrive and smile as they instantly recognise the songs. “I’ve got to go,” he says, and rushes off, 20 minutes till showtime.
Like watching Radiohead
Radiohead’s songs run from barnstorming guitar anthems to gentle ballads and experimental electronics, and Paranohead covered the whole range, expertly.
Something changed around the third song. Tribute bands tend to give accurate, faithful versions, and Radiohead are hard to copy, with rhythms that lock together and shift under each other. Paranohead were faithful too, but by then Robb was deep in it, and the band were watching each other. It began to feel less like covers and more like you had somehow managed to catch Radiohead in a tiny London venue.
A clip of Donald Trump (“they’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats”) is cut with Emmanuel Macron’s “nous sommes en guerre”, from his Covid address, a line with fresh resonance after a week of riots in Paris, with more clashes there that same day. Then “The National Anthem” hits the room, Robb beckons us towards him, and we crowd in.
They take risks, too. On “Everything in Its Right Place” they adopt and adapt what Radiohead do live, taking the vocal and reworking it as the song pushes on. During the acoustic numbers you could hear a penny drop; during the bangers, the anticipation rose with the music. Soon the crowd was singing along and greeting the bars of each new song with the same sound, a low “oh” that meant here we go, or a half-forgotten favourite coming back, or this is going to be good.
Filling a pub at lunchtime takes some doing but Paranohead did it while being entirely themselves. There were reminders of where they had come from: a “Bonjour London” from the stage, and a show of hands for the French people in the room. At the break, the keyboard player came off stage to sell T-shirts, fishing them out of one of the band’s big rollie bags because there had been no time to lay them out.
In the second half they were on fire. Robb told the room it was their first gig in London and their first in the UK. They hoped to come back soon, sparking shouts of encouragement. A three-song encore included “Karma Police”, with Robb holding the microphone out to a room singing along, and “Creep”, and then the close-out with what Radiohead is known for: a slow build, sharp and cynical lyrics and a crashing, exploding, grinding finale. And then the outpouring of love and gratitude on both sides for a life-enhancing and life-affirming experience. Radiohead themselves could not have been prouder.
If you are anywhere near Oxford on Tuesday, go. Paranohead play The Bullingdon on Cowley Road. Doors open at 7pm.
Was there , fantastic band ,brilliant covers, so glad we went to see them . Half moon- get them in again .
I went to this gig on Saturday and found it to be one of the most proffesionel and technically brilliant bands I have seen there at the historic half moon. I have myself played at the Half Moon pub twice, once in 2013 and again with my band in 2022. The mixing and sound in the audience was superb, and the tracks had various loops and backing tracks that were flawless. The songs were delivered perfectly.
I would happily recommend this band for any venue and any sized crowd. Short of going to an eqrmqrkíúú⁶⁶⁶ggʻ⁸ Cold Play yourself for real. The Half moon has been an historic music venue since 1963 and many of the greats have played there , The Kinks, The Who, The Stones , The Mod culture boomed around putney, I met Stevie Marriot on Earls court station and walked himto the Half moon carrying his guitar. He was playing with his band PACKET OF THREE.
This French band really blew me away and I would see them play again⁸ anytime. I would be pleased to be on the same bill as them
Kenneth Muir
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