Radiohead pay the curfew fine in advance at Blossom

Radiohead reportedly paid Blossom Music Center's $10,000 fine for playing past 11pm before they went on, so that their show there on 21 August could run its full length. Blossom charges it to any act still on stage at that hour. The band opened with “Sit Down. Stand Up.” and played 23 songs in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, after half an hour of guitar pop from Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks.

The pavilion and the lawn were full, and Thom Yorke walked on smiling, a long way from the band of Meeting People Is Easy. The only stage dressing was a wall of thin vertical lights like a giant stereo equaliser. Yorke's singing was at its strongest, Malcolm X Abram writes in the Akron Beacon Journal, on “Lucky” and “A Punch Up at a Wedding”.

Most of the set came from Hail to the Thief, and the crowd knew it well enough to cheer the new songs as they began. The singalongs, though, were for “Paranoid Android” and “The National Anthem”.