Radiohead play a Black Session for France Inter in Paris

Radiohead crossed the Channel on Tuesday 23 February, the day after Pablo Honey came out in Britain, to play a Black Session for France Inter at the Maison de la Radio in Paris. It is, the tape's uploader notes, their first appearance outside Britain, in the middle of a UK tour that picks up again at Manchester University tomorrow night.

They opened with “The Bends”, a new song that is on no record yet, and found room for “Rhinestone Cowboy”, the Larry Weiss song that was a hit for Glen Campbell. Nine of the 12 songs are on the album. “Pop Is Dead” is not, and one of the band introduced it in careful French as a song about the future of pop music, which, he told the listeners, is going to die this year.

The Black Sessions are concerts played in front of a studio audience and broadcast in Bernard Lenoir's programme C'est Lenoir; the name is a pun on his surname. The presenter introduced the band as five former Oxford students whose peculiarity is that they play with three guitars, and partway through explained that Jonny Greenwood was changing guitar because his had been giving him trouble since the start of the concert.

After “Pop Is Dead” the band talked on air with an interpreter's help, one of them first trying his French. Asked whether pop really is in trouble, a band member said it will be dead within a couple of years unless the record companies and the press get behind bands people actually want to hear and buy, instead of selling the old dead stars again. The only good pop star at the moment, he said, is a dead one. Did “Creep” come out of real misery? It certainly did, came the answer, and nobody can write songs without having lived them. The tape's uploader also hears Thom Yorke say that “Creep” should have been a hit and was not. As for what Pablo Honey means, that is a secret.

Setlist