Radiohead close the summer leg at White River with “Follow Me Around”

Radiohead closed the first leg of their North American tour last night at the White River Amphitheatre in Auburn, south of Seattle, and in the second encore Thom Yorke played “Follow Me Around” alone on acoustic guitar. It was not on the written setlist and has never been released; the film Meeting People Is Easy caught it at a soundcheck, and the band had not played it at a show since New York in August 2001. Yorke played it again this morning, with “Lucky” and “A Punchup at a Wedding”, in a short solo session for the Seattle station 107.7 The End at Studio X.

Stephen Malkmus opened. Radiohead's set ran to 24 songs and more than two hours. Ernest A. Jasmin, in the Tacoma News Tribune, counts more than 16,500 people, and Travis Hay of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer calls it the best show of a summer at the amphitheatre that has also had Ozzfest and Lollapalooza.

Hay reports that Yorke dedicated “A Punchup at a Wedding” to Michael Stipe of R.E.M. Both reviews have him remembering the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle as a world war on hippies; Jasmin places it after “Dollars and Cents” and adds that he pointed the crowd to the WTO's next meeting, in Mexico.

Setlist, White River Amphitheatre, 31 August 2003