On film · at home with radiohead · 2020
Live in Belfort (July 1997)
Les Eurockéennes had Radiohead 18 days after OK Computer came out in Britain.
1997
between Glastonbury and Torhout
Belfort fell between two nights that went wrong. At Glastonbury six days earlier, Thom Yorke's monitors failed four songs in and the lights left him blind, and it took Jonny Greenwood and Ed O'Brien to talk him out of walking off. The night after Belfort, in the mud at Torhout in Belgium, the monitors went again and nobody talked him round: he made a sarcastic speech during “Paranoid Android” and left, with no encore.
Belfort itself, on the peninsula in the Malsaucy lake on Friday 4 July, is on the film whole. The 15 songs on the night's setlist, from “Lucky” to “Just”, are the 15 in it, and when Colin put it up in July 2020 as the last of that year's weekly concerts, he called it “Lucky #13”.
Six of the songs are from OK Computer, and another, “Talk Show Host”, the B-side of “Street Spirit”, had only come into the set in Barcelona that May. Second to last is “Creep”. The band dropped it after June 1998 and did not play it again for three years, until the homecoming in South Park in Oxford in July 2001.
the film
Live in Belfort (July 1997)· Radioheadwatch on youtube →
sources5
- Radiohead, “Radiohead - Live in Belfort (July 1997)”, YouTube, 2 July 2020, youtube.com (the date, the festival, the running order, the running time)
- Stephen Dalton, Radiohead feature, Vox, September 1997, archive.org (Glastonbury and Torhout as Colin Greenwood and Dalton tell them)
- Rachel Narozniak, “Radiohead to conclude quarantine concert series with 1997 'OK Computer' show”, Dancing Astronaut, 2 July 2020, dancingastronaut.com (Colin Greenwood's “Lucky #13”, the last of the series)
- Alex Ross, “The Searchers”, The New Yorker, issue dated 13 August 2001, newyorker.com (“Creep” unheard since June 1998, back at South Park)
- This site's show pages for Glastonbury (28 June 1997), Belfort and Torhout, the release date of OK Computer, the song page for “Talk Show Host” (first played in Barcelona on 22 May 1997), and the stories of September 1997 (Vox) and August 2001 (The New Yorker)