Live at Bonnaroo (June 2006)

a record with no name

Radiohead headlined the Saturday of Bonnaroo, at Manchester in Tennessee, on 17 June 2006. The festival had sold out at 80,000, and Jon Pareles of The New York Times noted that each of its three headliners played a long set with no other stage running against them. Radiohead's ran to 28 songs, the longest set of their year so far, and Thom Yorke shouted “Now this is what I call a festival” from the stage.

Six of the 28 were songs from a record that had no title and no label yet, and that came out as In Rainbows in October 2007: “15 Step”, “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi”, “Videotape”, “Nude”, “Bodysnatchers” and “House of Cards”. “Nude” went back furthest, to Yorke alone with a guitar in Tokyo in January 1998, while the band had first played “Videotape” together only a month before, at Hammersmith. “Karma Police” had a false start. Pareles called the set magnificent, its songs setting melody against noise, with Yorke twitching and spinning across the stage.

the film they sat on

Bonnaroo filmed it, with Danny Clinch directing, and the band kept it. Yorke explained why on BBC 6Music that August, calling the night probably his favourite gig “for years and years and years”.

Actually it's all being filmed, but we're sitting on it because there's loads of new stuff on it. Because we're mean like that.

Thom Yorke · BBC 6Music, August 2006

A recording off the mixing desk got out first, in 2013, posted by a man who said a friend had mixed the festival and passed him the raw feed. When the band put the film on YouTube in May 2020, it came with the original desk audio, which had only just been found. Jonny Greenwood, trailing it, called Bonnaroo easily the best festival he had played in America.

I hope the heat, dust, and smell of fine Southern whiskey comes over as well as the songs.

Jonny Greenwood · May 2020