Radiohead play 11 new songs in two nights in Lisbon

Radiohead opened their summer run at the Coliseu dos Recreios in Lisbon with eight new songs before a single old one, and added three more on the second night. Johnny Davis was at both shows for this week's NME.

Thom Yorke and the others have 16 new songs rehearsed and play a handful each night, moving them about to find out which ones they and the crowds like best before they record. If a song works really well then we won't play it the next night. If people respond well to it, then we've tried it out. We don't want to get bored.¹

The first night, Monday 22 July, ran two and a half hours in two halves, the new songs, a 20-minute interval, then the old ones. “There There” opened the new set with Jonny Greenwood and Ed O'Brien on two big tom-toms in place of guitars; Colin Greenwood says they had worried two drummers might be cheesy, like the Redskins, but it was cool. For “Myxomatosis” Yorke read the words from a sheet on a music stand, a small Yamaha keyboard hung round his neck. He announced few of the new songs and joked that he should have handed out lyric sheets, and the next afternoon the night's setlist and the words to “Myxomatosis” turned up under NME's hotel door. In the encore came “Lift”, the old unreleased single, played for the first time since 1996.

Yorke disliked the interval, and on the second night old and new were mixed. “Sit Down. Stand Up.”, one of three songs heard for the first time, ends with Yorke shouting “Raindrops” over and over, and Davis rates it the fastest thing the band have done. It went down so well, NME says, that Yorke struck it from the next sets. It was back the very next night, and stayed in every set up to San Sebastian on 1 August.

The shows follow six months off, the longest break the band have had, and nine weeks of rehearsal that Yorke says were not easy. In the break they sent each other tapes of ideas, as they did before OK Computer, and this time Yorke let the others see his lyrics, which he did not on Kid A and Amnesiac. Lisbon was Ed's idea, and Colin calls the run the Creative Gentleman's Leisurely Tour.

At the end of August, Colin says, they fly to Los Angeles, where Nigel Godrich is renting a space, to work for two weeks and, as with OK Computer, to arrive with plenty of songs they know. The band hope to have the album out in March. It means we'll be in America for September 11. Which will be interesting.¹

Well, the idea is not to use any computers on this record.

Thom Yorke¹

Yorke laughed that it would be interesting to see how long that lasted.

New songs on the first two Lisbon nights