Action-Packed Radiohead Show Gets Audience Movin'

------------ MUSIC REVIEW ------------ Radiohead, with Drugstore, at the Sailors Union of the Pacific hall last night.

If you miss the sweaty togetherness of a teen dance at the school gym, you should have been at last night's Radiohead show.

The quintet from Oxford, England, played a set of gorgeous, dark shimmery pop, but most of the all-ages audience was too interested in crowd-surfing and attempts at stage-diving to give it full attention.

Momentum builds

Radiohead is not exactly mosh-pit music. They've been called "pop" but their sound is heavily more: layered, lush, songs that start off simple, then gradually gather more momentum, until they're crashing like a controlled train wreck of repetition and percussion.

The audience found the curiously excellent sound in this vast, dank hall eminently movable, and by the time Radiohead poked out the sterile beeps that open "Planet Telex," their third song of the evening, the body contact dancers hit their stride. Shoes, elbows and knees were everywhere, with security calmly slipping stage-divers away from the cringing band and back into the crowd, to be greeted with cheers and hoisted onto shoulders again and again.

Through it all, Radiohead seemed to retreat into a world of their own. It was if two shows were going on; one in the crowd, the other a supreme weaving of music texture that literally seeped through the pores of frontman Thom Yorke.

Teens love it

With his petite frame, skinny strawberry-colored hair and delicate features squeezed into a snarl, Yorke eked out true teen-angst lyrics in a succulent, Harry Nilsson-like vibrato. Yorke's songs of deep-lonely detachment fused with crisp punk anger struck a note with the crowd, who mouthed along with several passages from new tune "The Bends."

Fellow Brit band Drugstore opened the show. With a groovy frontwoman reminiscent of Kristen Hersch, but rocking a little harder, why this band isn't already famous is a mystery.