Radiohead open their OK Computer tour of America at the Wiltern

Radiohead opened their North American tour at a sold-out Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles on Saturday 26 July, with Teenage Fanclub in support. OK Computer had entered the Billboard 200 at number 21 earlier in the month, already above anything Pablo Honey or The Bends reached there. On the day of the show Thom Yorke told Sara Scribner of the Los Angeles Times that he didn't really mind the attention “Creep” still gets, as long as it was taken with a sense of humour. Sometimes I just enjoy hamming it up, like Frank Sinatra or something¹. Read another way, he said, the song is his “My Way”.

The night before, the band played one song on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno at NBC in Burbank, and chose a snarling “Electioneering” over “Let Down” or anything friendlier to radio. Yorke's guitar carried a pro-choice slogan. Leno sent food baskets backstage, and Phil Selway, who thought it rude to leave them, gave them to the limousine drivers in the car park.

Yorke, 28, told Scribner he found the praise for the album a bit over the top, though he liked it. It had been hard to make and a big risk. Michael Stipe, now a friend, gave him advice and support through the sessions, because his feelings about the record swung about. one week I'd love the album and the next week I'd hate it.¹ He kept dreaming of tidal waves. Among the album's reading he named Buddhist texts, Noam Chomsky and contemporary British poetry. “Paranoid Android” and “Subterranean Homesick Alien”, he said, are about the obsession with outer space and alien abduction, which he sees as misplaced spirituality and a way out of social responsibility.

Capitol had its doubts too. Perry Watts-Russell, the label's vice-president of A&R, first heard the album with “radio ears” and feared it had no obvious radio song. Then I listened to it on an airplane with headphones and I had an epiphany. I went from fear to absolute pride.¹

Stipe took Yorke shopping before the show, which nearly made him late, and was in the crowd with Liv Tyler and members of Hole. Afterwards Stipe gave Yorke a private party at a West Hollywood restaurant.

Robert Hilburn, reviewing the night in Monday's Los Angeles Times, calls OK Computer brilliant and tells readers to watch Radiohead, as well as the Prodigy, as the British band likely to break America this year. Troy J. Augusto in today's Variety rates the new songs, “Karma Police” and “Exit Music (For a Film)” among them, the best of the night, and says Yorke's improvised flourishes lifted them above the record.

Setlist, Wiltern Theatre, 26 July 1997 (show page)