Scott Walker brings Radiohead to Meltdown, sold out in half an hour

Radiohead's show at Meltdown, at the Royal Festival Hall in London on 1 July, sold out this morning within half an hour of tickets going on sale. By 10.30am the hall's security had turned away about 200 people who came to buy in person, and a spokesperson told nme.com that all 40 of its phone lines had been jammed all morning, a rush the hall called unprecedented, though not unexpected.

The band announced the date on radiohead.com a week ago, on 6 March. Scott Walker is curating Meltdown this year and asked them to play. He asked us and we were into it being Scott Walker freaks etc.¹

It is the first Radiohead concert announced since the band's last full show, the Amnesty International night at Bercy in Paris in December 1998. NME expects the untitled fourth album in late September, cut down to 16 songs, and prints 16 titles it says are in the running, among them “Knives Out”, “Egyptian Song” and “True Love Waits”.

The band say other European shows around the same time are planned but not settled, and the bigger European gigs will come at the end of the summer. So these are small kind of things because we aren't ready for big kind of things.¹