Radiohead open their North American tour outside Houston

Radiohead opened their North American tour on 18 June at the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion in The Woodlands, outside Houston, and Thom Yorke dedicated “Paranoid Android” to all the people in the back smoking weed¹. Billboard, calling this the band's first major North American tour in more than three years, picked that song, in the middle of the main set, as the high point of the night.

The show had sold out. The week before, Amnesiac had gone in at number two on the Billboard 200. Radiohead played 22 songs over about two hours, half of them from Kid A and Amnesiac and none from Pablo Honey. Jessica Parker, reviewing for the Dallas Observer, found the Amnesiac songs came alive on stage and even got some people dancing, though the OK Computer songs still outshone the rest. The tour moves on to Red Rocks, outside Denver, on 20 June.

Yorke was in high spirits. He and Ed O'Brien played up to the crowd while Jonny Greenwood stayed bent over his electronics, a transistor radio among them. At the piano for “You And Whose Army?”, which opened the encore, Yorke sat with his back to the audience, kept waving them into a roar and cutting it dead, and laughed into the microphone at the result. He introduced “Street Spirit (Fade Out)” as a song for anyone who has ever walked down the street and seen figures that weren't strictly there as such².

Setlist