Radiohead and Belly fill the Varsity Theatre in Milwaukee

Radiohead and Belly played to a full Varsity Theatre in Milwaukee in October 1993. The show was booked by Marquette University's student concert committee, which in the early 1990s liked to catch bands on the way up.

Marquette Today, the university's magazine, looked back at the committee in May 2024 and counted the night among its four most memorable shows. Mike Swartz, who led the committee in 1994, remembers that a band with a buzz about it brought calls from other bands wanting to come. This time it was the Breeders, who had played Marquette earlier in the year, and they sat in the balcony as guests alongside agents and people from the media.

The committee paid Radiohead a few thousand dollars, as it had paid Pearl Jam the year before. Michelle Anthony, a member who later ran the committee, calls Radiohead the biggest show, in my opinion, that we had at Marquette¹.