Radiohead to play ten small shows in Portugal and Spain this summer

Radiohead will play ten small concerts in Portugal and Spain in July and August, and nothing else this year. A spokesperson said on 10 April that the run will not be added to and that there will be no British shows until 2003. Billboard had tipped the band for several British festivals this summer; that is now off.

2002 is pretty much dedicated to writing and recording new material. Part of this process involves playing in the new stuff in front of an audience, hence the shows.

Radiohead spokesperson⁵

Studio sessions are booked to start later in April and run into May, and the record is to be finished after the tour. A few of the new songs were aired at the last shows of the Amnesiac world tour in 2001, and the band have been resting since. The cities, the spokesperson said, were picked because the band like good settings and interesting venues.

W.A.S.T.E., the band's mail-order and fan club, offered its members tickets for the first six nights on 20 March, ahead of the general sale that Saturday, and promised a great deal of new material at “intimate” shows. By 27 March there were second nights in Lisbon and Oporto, and the Lisbon opener had moved from 21 to 22 July. On 8 April two more nights at the Teatro Kursaal made three running in San Sebastian.

Jonny Greenwood has said the shows are a chance for the band to get their act together and for the songs to change as they go, and Ed O'Brien told The Face in December that Glastonbury, or any festival, was the wrong place for new songs. The idea is that we don't want to do anything big. The idea is to be pretty self-indulgent – that means we'll play new material.⁵

The run as it stood on 10 April 2002