Thom Yorke's Sydney Opera House concert film is free on YouTube

Thom Yorke Live at Sydney Opera House, the film of Thom Yorke's two solo shows on the Opera House Forecourt in November 2024, went up in full and free on the Sydney Opera House's YouTube channel today. Stuart Buchanan, the Opera House's head of screen, says Yorke was first on the venue's list of artists it wanted to film, and that he picked its 16 songs himself from the 34 he played over the two nights. The seagulls that circled the forecourt during “Dawn Chorus” stayed in.

The shows came from Yorke's 2024 tour, the first on which he was alone on stage. The film opens on an acoustic “Let Down” and takes in UNKLE's “Rabbit in Your Headlights”, which Yorke sang on in 1998, and “Black Swan” with Yorke on bass. “Hearing Damage”, his 2009 song for the Twilight: New Moon soundtrack, is in it too; he played it live for the first time when the tour opened in Christchurch.

Dave May of Tall Story Films directed it. He kept camera operators off the floor and shot from overhead and over Yorke's shoulder. Our number one priority was to not impact the show for the audience and the artist², he told Double J. Some songs, “Rabbit in Your Headlights” among them, are built from composite shots, and the edit breaks the coda of “Everything in Its Right Place” into cross-dissolves and expanding blocks of colour.

Thom Yorke Live at Sydney Opera House, running order