I love Radio­head for many reasons. One of them is this video. The song they’re playing (The Smiths’s Head­mas­ter Ritual) is one of my favorites, and you can tell it’s one of theirs as well; I imagine them as timid English school­boys in 1985, clus­ter­ing around the hi-fi, listen­ing to Meat is Murder and thinking “That’s what I want to be doing with my life”.

Besides being really touching, it’s also just a great perfor­mance. There’s a “cover band” stigma in the rock world: the act of inter­pre­ta­tion garners little respect, while much more value is placed on orig­i­nal­ity (exactly the reverse of the current clas­si­cal-music paradigm). I think in the future we’ll see a gradual increase of rock musi­cians recre­at­ing the canon, with the original record­ing acting as the author­i­ta­tive version instead of a musical score. More perfor­mances like this one wouldn’t be bad.