Have you tried adding some crowd noise ;)
You’re clearly pretty deep in this stuff, so I’m going to be a bit blunt for your benefit. Please keep re-reading our post about mixing until you understand that you’re putting your efforts in the wrong place. To sum it up in a quote: “A lot of the gear at the Glastonbury 1997 performance is different from the Astoria 1994 performance, but the two still sound closer to each other than to the [1995] Jools Holland recording.”
As Jonny often says, recordings are never the same as live performances. By the same token, the sound from an amp in your room is never going to be the sound on a recording (studio or live), even if Jonny played your room with the exact gear from that show.
If you read our full rundown of the gear used for the Astoria show, you’ll see that Jonny’s setup isn’t that complicated. A couple Tele Plus guitars, a couple amps, and a handful of pedals. You can find the full signal chain on Jonny’s effects page (along with the signal chain for all of his Radiohead pedalboards from 1992-present). But his sound for most of the show is just a Tele Plus into Shredmaster into an Eighty-Five — what difference would it make if his Small Stone was before or after his Tremulator? That’s not going to affect the choice of mic, the mic position, the eq and compression and gate applied to it at the FOH mixer, and the sound of the PA speakers.
And even that doesn’t cover the blend of “dry” and “mic’d” sound available by splitting the signal before the amp with a DI box connected to the FOH mixer. While that’s partly used as a backup in case an amp breaks, Jim Warren (Radiohead FOH mix engineer) explicitly mentions blending in the dry signal for certain songs in an Audiotechnology interview. We go into more depth in the Fender Eighty-Five entry on Jonny’s amplifiers page, but in the 90s Jonny fed the DI box from the “Preamp Out” on his Eighty-Five. This meant the DI sound has the slightly mid-scooped sound of a Fender 3-band EQ, but without the mid-focused sound of a Fender speaker.
Note the stack of Summit Audio DCL-200 rack compressors on the right, used for Thom’s vocals, Ed’s vocals, and Colin’s DI bass signal (Audiotechnology 34).
We obviously think gear matters, or we wouldn’t have created this blog. But we care about the way gear is used, not just the brand of the amplifier. Thinking about gear only as a guitarist — focusing on guitars and amps and pedals without thinking about the rest of the picture — will really limit your ability to understand how recordings are made. They’re just one part of the picture.
If you’re really desperate for those more aggressive distortion sounds, you could rig up a PA speaker and run it alongside your Eighty-Five. But even then, you’re missing the sound of a close microphone on the Eighty-Five’s speaker, which picks up more high frequencies than you hear from a playing distance. So maybe just add an EQ pedal to your current setup, and mess with it until it sounds the same, even if it’s not the exact same setup.
Jonny playing his Ebony Frost Tele Plus during My Iron Lung at the Astoria on May 27, 1994. Note the cable connected to the “Preamp Output” on the Fender Eighty-Five behind him. The speaker is still connected when the Preamp Output is used, and the amp is visibly mic’d in other footage from the show.