Radiohead bring back “Climbing Up the Walls” in The Woodlands

Radiohead brought “Climbing Up the Walls” back on Saturday night at the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion in The Woodlands, north of Houston, a stop on the first North American leg of the In Rainbows tour. It came in the first encore, the song's first outing of the 2008 tour and its first anywhere since Dublin in August 2006.

Thom Yorke did not introduce a song until the 12th of the night, “Optimistic”, and when he did it was to remember how Kid A went down at home. Back in England, they thought we had lost it. We thought that was the point.¹ The Texas crowd then sang the high parts of “Optimistic” with him.

Every seat was sold, and so was the sloping lawn behind them; Liars opened with a short set. Radiohead played 24 songs in about two hours, among them all ten from In Rainbows and something from every album except Pablo Honey. There was no “Creep”. “Everything in Its Right Place” had been pushed towards the dance floor, in a version Craig Hlavaty of the Houston Press likened to New Order.

The stage was hung with low-energy LED tubes that drifted through blues, yellows and pinks, and went red for “Nude”. Jonny Greenwood spent the night at stage right among two laptops or more and a pair of old-looking synthesizers, often with his back to the crowd.

Small cameras fixed under the microphone stands and on the lighting put the players' faces on the screens close up, nods and shut eyes included, and one sat inside Yorke's piano. In “You and Whose Army?”, the second-last song, he sang straight into it, smirking.

Setlist, 17 May 2008