Radiohead try out a new keyboard song in San Francisco

Radiohead opened their first encore at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco on Thursday night with a new song, Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood both at keyboards. Yorke introduced it only as “Untitled”, but it is “Big Ideas (Don't Get Any)”, later known as “Nude”, first played with the full band in Dallas four nights earlier. Eric Hellweg, reviewing the show for Rolling Stone, likens it to Procol Harum. “Let Down” and “Street Spirit (Fade Out)” followed.

The hall holds 7,000 and was sold out, a night after the band played the Universal Amphitheatre) in Los Angeles. They walked on to the taped “Meeting in the Aisle” and went into “Airbag” without a word. From “Planet Telex”, the third song, security staff were pulling crushed fans out of the packed floor again and again.

Hellweg found the set leaning on OK Computer, The Bends and the B-sides, with almost nothing from Pablo Honey. He thought it a fine night that came close to sameness, with slower songs such as “The Trickster” and “No Surprises” all building the same way. He heard the second encore as another new song, and a fast one; the setlist has it as “Lurgee”, from Pablo Honey.

Greenwood switched between guitar, keyboard, xylophone and theremin, and “Karma Police” and “Paranoid Android” ran well past their recorded length. Yorke said almost nothing all night, except to lay into the promoter from a local radio station, who had stopped Greenwood playing Public Enemy when the band visited the studio that afternoon.

Setlist, Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, 2 April 1998