Radiohead sell out the Metro in Chicago

Thom Yorke sang “Creep” with his arms held as if in a straitjacket at the Metro in Chicago on Wednesday 30 June, and the sold-out room sang it with him. Radiohead headlined, with the Scottish band the Trash Can Sinatras also on the bill, and played 17 songs in a little over an hour, one of them the new “The Bends”.

The Chicago Tribune, reviewing both bands, noticed Yorke and Jonny Greenwood dressed alike in horizontally striped sailor shirts and dark jeans, like villagers from The Prisoner. The paper picked out Ed O'Brien's guitar on “Stop Whispering”, thick with wah-wah.

A crew from JBTV, the Chicago music programme, filmed the show. Their edit, as the notes with the Internet Archive copy describe it, drops “Lurgee” and the encore and cuts in an interview with Yorke and Colin Greenwood, but it keeps the crowd-surfers, and Yorke falling over on stage during “Inside My Head”. An audience tape of the whole night survives too.

The notes with the tape say Yorke told the crowd they were the best audience of the tour so far, but in the encore, when people shouted for “Creep” a second time, he got snippy with them.

Setlist