Her electric violin at the ready on her right shoulder, Mavy Ho-Le ’26 started to slowly tap her foot on the stage at Olin Arts Center. It was Saturday Oct. 25 and the first strains of Radiohead’s 2016 song “Daydreaming,” were beginning to emerge from Fitter Happier, a Radiohead tribute band based in Portland. Ho-Le, of Gorham, Maine, was one of five Bates students and community members with string instruments grouped stage left, ready to join in on cue.

There was at least one aficionado of Radiohead among the Bates musicians, Xucheng Zheng ’27 of Shanghai, China. Sitting in front of Ho-Le, Zheng likely recognized the song before lead singer Jeff Beam sang a single melancholy note on that Saturday night. Zheng, who is used to playing with an orchestra, was particularly eager to play “Daydreaming,” a favorite Radiohead song. 

But Ho-Le, a neuroscience major who has been playing electric violin professionally for years, had to feel her way into the song. She’d had less than a day with the sheet music to practice, and even though she works regularly as a professional musician when she’s not focused on her neuroscience major, it was almost all new to her. “I only know ‘Creep,’” she said later, referring to Radiohead’s breakthrough single from 1992.

That didn’t matter; the beauty of the event was that Radiohead expertise wasn’t required to be swept up in what happened on stage at Olin between Fitter Happier, made up of Beam, Sam Pisner, Scott Nebel, Elliot Heeschen, and Pete Dugas, and the Bates musicians. “It was electric,” Ho-Le said afterward.

The audience of more than 100 seemed to agree, from the little boy dancing wildly on his mother’s lap to the young person who shouted “you guys sound amazing” after Beam expressed his pleasure at playing in Olin, saying “it’s kind of the Carnegie Hall of Lewiston.” 

The collaboration was put together by Stuart Gurley, who manages both Olin Arts and the applied music program at Bates. His goal was to give Bates students a taste of the life of a professional musician as well as a chance to “take their skills that they learn in their lessons and their ensembles, and see how active working musicians utilize those in different professional environments,” Gurley says. Artists come to Bates regularly, and work with students in master classes, Gurley said. “But this is different. It puts them on a more equal footing with the artists themselves.” And in perhaps a different genre. 

He’d done something similar before, bringing Beatles Night with Spencer Albee to Bates in early 2020. Albee is known regionally (and beyond) for his Beatles tribute band, Spencer and the Walrus, which for the last two decades has been selling out two and sometimes even three nights at the State Theater in Portland each Thanksgiving. Ever since Gurley coordinated with Albee to bring that Beatles experience, backed by student musicians, to Bates, he’d been looking for opportunities to do something similar.

Gurley understands that the ensembles and coursework and lessons that happen at Bates are essential, but he also knows what it means to work in the music industry in 2025. It’s not easy, but it might be easier if he can help students find intersecting commonalities between academia and the music industry.

“You can have all your experience here at Bates and go out and get a gig in an orchestra or, if you’re really lucky, in a jazz band,” he said. “But there are unfortunately just fewer and fewer of those opportunities these days.” The best chances to make a living playing live music are in the realm of popular music, he explained. “And there’s a lot of groups from Radiohead right on down to very small acts that need violins and horns to tour with them.”

The genesis for bringing Fitter Happier to Bates actually took place at one of his own musical gigs. As Gurley told the audience in Olin as he was introducing Fitter Happier, he’d been talking to a good friend and musician he was working with at a wedding gig. Long breaks (and waits) are typical of such gigs, Gurley said. And during one of those breaks, the friend made the argument that Radiohead was the most significant and important band out there.

Gurley had his doubts, but pondered this, considering his own past as a teenaged fan, and the band’s use of electronica. “They were one of the first bands to really integrate electronica in modern production ways, with new technologies, and new modalities of thinking,” he said. “And now it’s everywhere.” Radiohead easily fits into the spectrum of music studied at Bates, he said. 

Moreover, a lot of students might already have the band on their playlist. TikTok has played a role in the resurgence of Radiohead and other musical acts, including Sade and Kate Bush, often leading to chart-topping hits years (even decades) after the initial release of the song. In the case of Radiohead, the Hulu series The Bear used “Let Down,” a Radiohead song from OK Computer, in the show’s Season 1 finale. In August of this year, 28 years after its release, the song charted on the Billboard Top 100 for the first time. 

Zheng, who described herself as a Radiohead fan before the concert, was energized by the collaborative nature of the opportunity. “Now I really want to try playing with a band,” Zheng said. 

Aidan Buck ’29 of Arlington, Mass., said he was only a “moderate” Radiohead fan before the Fitter Happier concert. “I haven’t listened to their catalogue in full, but what I’ve heard I really enjoy. I’m a big fan of experimental music as a whole.” Most of his musical training came by ear or was based in improvisation, he said.

“I wanted to be part of this concert because it sounded like a cool opportunity to play experimental music at Bates with peers, faculty, and the greater L/A community.” 

He’s played instruments his whole life, from the trumpet in his middle school’s jazz band to bass in a rock band in high school. Typically he plays string instruments, but for the Fitter Happier show, he played the flugelhorn.

“I didn’t know much going into the first and only rehearsal on Saturday afternoon,” Buck said. “And as someone who can’t sight read music very well, I turned to my ear training and figured out my flugelhorn parts by listening to the original recordings of my assigned songs. Once I was able to get my parts down pat, I think the horn and string sections sounded really nice and made a great addition to the already awesome band.”

There was also something in the collaborative experience for Fitter Happier. As Beam, who considers Radiohead “the Beatles of this generation,” explained before the show, the Bates musicians allowed Fitter Happier, which was touring in Vermont and New Hampshire, to do some songs they couldn’t do as a five-person band, including the many songs that Radiohead recorded with strings and horns.

“Not full orchestra stuff,” Beam says, “but songs that we can’t necessarily replicate without extra players.” After the accompanying horns and strings left the stage of Olin for the last time, Beam asked the audience to give the students a hand. And then paid them a high compliment: “I wish we could have them out here the whole time.”