Radiohead – Lotus Flower: Official Video

Radiohead & Wayne McGregor go MonoChromatic

The Royal Ballet’s Resident Choreographer Wayne McGregor choreographing the latest video for Radiohead? Not as unlikely as it seems. McGregor’s already dabbled with the world of rock for his best-known work Chroma (utilising arrangements of The White Stripes) and several Radiohead ditties were used by Stephen Petronio for Scottish Ballet’s Ride the Beast. The well-worked joke with Lotus Flower, of course, is that Thom Yorke, Radiohead’s lead singer, with his awkward frame and beautifully understated melancholic voice, is the most unlikely music star to be popping dance routines; Beyoncé he is not. But actually he and McGregor share a common language of spiky paranoia, where thoughts and ideas are flung out from the body as though painful in creation and best got rid of. You also have the sense that Yorke would probably dance a bit like that down the local Ritzy.

With 7 million hits on You Tube in less than a month Lotus Flower is already McGregor’s most viewed work. And very few of those 7 million would have ever stepped into a theatre to watch McGregor’s work. Now if McGregor could just persuade Yorke and co to knock up with some music for a Royal Ballet production maybe, just maybe, Covent Garden could attract the new audience they crave.