Radiohead Uncovered review by Solomiya Sywak

If you tried to categorise Radiohead’s complete discography, you’d quickly lose the thread. Experimental, abrasive, melancholic and endlessly shape-shifting, the British alternative rock icons have spent three decades resisting easy definition. Now, that restless energy has been handed to an unlikely vessel: literally an eclectic choir. In Radiohead Uncovered: How to Disappear Completely…, presented as part of Sydney Fringe, Eklektika reimagine Radiohead’s fractured soundscapes through the collective force of the human voice.

The audience itself was telling of what the show sets out to accomplish. Sitting beside me was a father and his pre-teen son: the elder visibly eager, nodding along to the music, while the younger was lulled into sleep by the at-times haunting choral arrangements. It was an oddly fitting image for a show built around music that has traversed generations.

A small choir of twelve voices, accompanied by an even smaller instrumental ensemble of piano, bass and violin, floods the theatre with a strange, infectious sense of joy. Loosely mapping Radiohead’s discography across four sections, Alienate, Camouflage, Escape and Transcend, the performance unfolds less like a retrospective than a narrative, moving through the band’s shifting sonic landscapes and emotional registers. As Eklektika musical director Judy Stubbs put it in her thanks to the audience, the aim was ultimately “to fall in love with Radiohead” all over again.

The show is at its strongest when it leans into the qualities that already make Radiohead strange. Songs that are slowed down, stripped back or pushed further towards the experimental edge of art rock find an especially natural home in the choral arrangement. The emotional arc builds towards Escape, where the choir embraces a heightened theatricality, before reaching its most haunting point in Nude.

Lined up across the stage, the singers never feel stretched thin. Each voice remains distinct, but no one voice overwhelms the whole. There is something genuinely unsettling about being stared down by a row of middle-aged choristers as they sing ‘we hope you choke’, their voices gradually warping into something resembling the soundtrack to a haunted Victorian orphanage. It should be alienating. Instead, the strangeness draws you further in.

This is where the performance’s theatricality becomes most effective. The choir’s physicality; their glances, gestures and expressions turns songs that might otherwise be familiar into something newly uncanny. Radiohead’s alienation becomes communal rather than isolating: twelve people standing together, singing music born from disconnection.

The visual language of the production takes a little longer to find its place. Archival montages, CGI and deliberately manipulated footage initially feel as though they are running alongside the performance rather than responding to it. As the choir becomes stranger and more theatrical, however, the relationship begins to click. The imagery starts to behave less like a backdrop and more like an extension of the performance.

That distinction is particularly striking in an age of increasingly frenetic visual stimulation. It is remarkable how quickly moving colours and images can become secondary to twelve people simply standing and singing. At key moments, distorted real-time footage of the ensemble and individual soloists is layered across the screen, but the rawness of the performance makes the projection almost incidental. Whatever the screen is doing, it is difficult to look away from the choir itself.

That same restraint carries through to the instrumental ensemble, which understands that its role is to support rather than compete with the voices. Tony Lockett’s bass guitar provides a much-needed depth beneath the choir, grounding the arrangements without weighing them down, while Amber Newell’s violin resists the temptation to assert itself as a soloist. Instead, it moves around the voices, knowing when to recede and when to rise. It is another small but important decision that keeps the choir at the centre of the performance.

Ultimately, it is the energy of the musicians, voice and instrument alike that grounds the show. After an hour of non-stop performance, their eyes still shine with wonder and reverence for the music they are performing, their enthusiasm palpable enough to radiate beyond the stage. It is this raw passion that transforms Radiohead’s characteristic grit into something unexpectedly immersive and meditative.

Radiohead Uncovered does not attempt to reproduce Radiohead. Nor does it need to. Its success lies in finding another language for the band’s restless experimentation: twelve voices, three instruments and a stage that gradually dissolves into Radiohead’s world. What begins as an exercise in re-arrangement becomes something more intimate – a reminder that music about alienation can, in the right hands, become an experience of connection.

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Solomiya Sywak attended Radiohead Uncovered at the Eternity Playhouse on Saturday 5 September.