Radiohead go back to the Wuhlheide, last played on 11 September 2001

Radiohead played a sold-out Wuhlheide in Berlin on 8 July through one heavy shower after another. Thom Yorke reminded the crowd that the band's last concert there had been on 11 September 2001, and they played “My Iron Lung”.

For Andreas Hartmann in the taz, the rain made the evening. People pressed together under their umbrellas, couples closer than ever, and he tied the mood to the essayist Mark Greif's argument, in the magazine n+1, that Radiohead's music is built on a sense of “we”. Since Kid A and Amnesiac, he wrote, the band have let the electronics lead, closer to the Chemical Brothers or Underworld than to a rock band, and live it pays off; the only moments that sounded dated were when a guitar squealed on its own.

Markus Schneider in the Berliner Zeitung was cooler about the concepts around the band, the statements urging fans to come by public transport and the free stream of In Rainbows on Last.fm. The concert itself he found highly impressive. He picked out the opening “15 Step”, “Weird Fishes” and “Bodysnatchers”, which ended the main set, and a stage like a forest of rods, some standing and some hanging, that caught the lights, with low screens showing the players in a single tint. Yorke apologised for the weather, and again when the piano start to “Cymbal Rush” went wrong. Schneider's one reservation was the voice, and anyone who dislikes Yorke's plaintive singing, he wrote, will find “Nude”, the second half of “Paranoid Android” or “No Surprises” hard going.

The concert lasted two hours and ended with “Street Spirit (Fade Out)” under lights made to look like scratched film, with a few fireworks going off beside the stage.