The New Yorker spends Radiohead's summer with them

The New Yorker has published “The Searchers”, Alex Ross's long report from Radiohead's summer on the road, from the bullring in Bilbao in May to South Park in Oxford in July. The day after the Bilbao show, over lunch at the Etxebarri restaurant in the hills above the city, the talk turned to SFX, the concert promoter whose parent company, Clear Channel, runs more than a thousand radio stations. S.F.X. is a parasite that needs a host to feed on.¹

Ed O'Brien argued that it would lose its reason to exist once it stopped growing; Yorke said it would spread forever. When Chris Hufford, the band's manager, told him that this was the marketplace, and capitalism, Yorke shouted Bollocks!¹ and left the table in a mock huff. This summer Radiohead have chosen open-air sites out of SFX's reach, among them Liberty State Park in Jersey City, where they play on 16 and 17 August.

The same day the band toured the Guggenheim, and Colin Greenwood told the guide that one of Richard Serra's steel pieces had been moved, which it had. At the exit she complained that they had not once all been together; Yorke told her it was not the first time and would not be the last. At the show itself Yorke dedicated “No Surprises” to George W. Bush.

Nigel Godrich remembers the Kid A and Amnesiac sessions, which began in 1999 and ran about a year and a half, as full of arguing, with people no longer speaking to each other. Yorke wanted out of verse-chorus songs, and O'Brien wanted guitar rock back. All the drama was just a form of procrastination. Next time, three weeks, and we're out.¹ At one sound check nobody could remember the last chord of “The Tourist”, Jonny Greenwood included, though he wrote it, and nobody had a copy of OK Computer. Weeks later O'Brien suggested D7.

The band had long had a fantasy, O'Brien says, of re-enacting U2's Live at Red Rocks video. At Red Rocks outside Denver they sat for an MTV interview, and when Gideon Yago called Amnesiac a set of Kid A outtakes, Selway snapped Try again!¹

South Park drew 44,000 on a drizzly day, to a bill the band chose that ran from Humphrey Lyttelton, 80, playing Armstrong and Ellington, to Sigur Rós. The rain poured during “How to Disappear Completely” and the crowd stayed. Yorke came out alone for the last song, the organ died during “Motion Picture Soundtrack”, and the band came back and played “Creep”, not heard at a Radiohead show since June 1998. Afterwards Yorke told Colin's wife, Molly, Don't know if you could tell, but I was in tears for the last part of it.¹

Where Ross saw them