Radiohead play 15 club nights across the US and Canada

Radiohead finished their club tour of the US and Canada at the Palace in Los Angeles last night, three weeks after it opened at the Paradise in Boston on 26 May. Capitol, announcing the tour on 22 May, pointed out that Boston was the city of the band's first American show, at the Venus de Milo in June 1993. The label says they will be back in July for more West Coast dates.

At Toad's Place in New Haven on 30 May, Thom Yorke sang in in-ear monitors and said little to the crowd beyond thanks, except to introduce three of the dreamier songs as soundtracks to car adverts that haven't been made yet³. It was an all-ages show, and the Hartford Courant's reviewer was surprised how many parents had come with their children.

The band started with “The Bends”, and songs like “Fake Plastic Trees” began quietly and blew up about halfway through. The Courant rated them further along than U2 were when they played Toad's about 15 years ago.

Two nights later at Tramps in New York, the New York Daily News saw Yorke as Munch's The Scream come to life. That show opened on “The Bends” too, and “Creep” came in the middle of the set rather than being held back. The paper rated the older Pablo Honey songs livelier than the new ones, “Anyone Can Play Guitar” above all. It found no jokes and little fun in the set, but a strange kind of excitement.

In America the first single from The Bends) is “Fake Plastic Trees”, and Jake Scott's video for it is in heavy rotation on MTV as a Buzz Clip. By 22 May, Capitol said, the song was in the top 20 of Billboard's Modern Rock Tracks, with the album climbing the Billboard 200. Clark Staub, a marketing director at Capitol, told Entertainment Weekly the label chose it to get as far from “Creep” as it could.

Nobody's going to call them 'that “Fake Plastic Trees” band.'

Clark Staub²

In the same piece Yorke remembers managers and label people asking, all through the making of The Bends, where the American radio song was. The two US tours behind Pablo Honey, two months each, had nearly broken the band, though Colin Greenwood calls it more of a breakdown than a breakup.

Ed O'Brien told the Orlando Sentinel during this tour that British bands have been too arrogant to work America the way American bands do. “Creep” was the first thing Radiohead ever recorded and nobody thought it would be a hit. The long stretch of playing it left them in a rut until the new songs came.

We're stronger as a unit now than we've ever been.

Ed O'Brien⁵

US and Canadian tour, May to June 1995