By rights, Radiohead should have been here to relive the good old days. It's been nearly fifteen years and five albums since they last played in Auckland. That was in 1998 at the at the height of the British art-rock outfit's third album OK Computer making them a very big deal indeed.
That magnum opus stills cast a long and glorious shadow over their career and in fan memories - as was witnessed to the response to two of its tracks, Airbag (up early) and the symphonic Paranoid Android (last song in the first encore) by the sold-out Vector Arena crowd.
But this wasn't a greatest hits show. It wasn't even pushing their recent offering, 2011's King of Limbs too much with maybe half a dozen tracks in the two-hour two-encore show. Which might have left many present a bit non-plussed at no dusting off of breakthrough hit Creep, or anything off second big-chorus anthemic album The Bends.
But this show was Radiohead, possibly rock's most popular experimentalists celebrating that great body of work post-OK Computer. And they did that with a visually spectacular, sonically gripping, often confounding and sometimes maddening show that didn't play to the usual arena rock rules. The kaleidoscopic light show and tilting video screens (if God has Skype, this must be what it looks like) was a mad futuristic Close Encounters dazzle one minute, while the next it was projecting each of the band at their tasks, like a cutaway diagram of a grand machine.
While musically, from the serpentine groove of Lotus Flower which opened to the hydraulically-powered headrush of Idioteque that was the band's final sprint to the line, this was a show that to show how far, how weird and how deep they've come.
