Radiohead skip South by Southwest for a secret show at the Troubadour

Radiohead dropped their long-standing booking at the South by Southwest conference in Austin this week and played a “secret” show at the 250-seat Troubadour in Los Angeles instead, on Thursday 14 March. With the industry in Texas, the room was full of ordinary fans. Thom Yorke told Mark Brown, who reviewed the night for MTV News and Addicted to Noise, why that suited them.

Why play for a bunch of people who’ll be looking over their shoulders just to see who else is there?

Thom Yorke¹

Yorke warned early on that they had not come to play old favourites like “Creep”, and the set leaned on “Lucky” and songs being worked up for the next record. They played a new one, “Electioneering”. “High and Dry” and “Fake Plastic Trees” drew the biggest response; in “Fake Plastic Trees” the band crashed into the middle break and then stopped dead under Yorke's whisper.

After the two-song encore the house lights came up and the PA music started, but nobody would leave. The band came back, ran through “Creep” as something close to heavy metal and then, with nothing else rehearsed, played “Electioneering” again.

On Friday Radiohead were the musical guests on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, playing “High and Dry”, and this weekend they go on to New York to tape songs for MTV.

Yorke also told Brown what happened backstage in December at KROQ's Almost Acoustic Christmas, one of the radio Christmas shows) that ended Radiohead's year.

I got really stoned afterwards and got the fear really badly. There was this series of quite famous people coming up and talking to me

Thom Yorke¹

His one-word answers were taken for British snobbery, and one of them gave him a lecture on how to behave in front of famous people. He would not say who.