Radiohead add “Kid A” and “My Iron Lung” to the set outside St Louis

Radiohead played “Kid A” and “My Iron Lung” for the first time on the In Rainbows tour on Wednesday 14 May, at the Verizon Wireless Amphitheater in Maryland Heights, just outside St Louis. It was the sixth night of a North American leg played entirely in amphitheatres, which opened in West Palm Beach on 5 May.

Thom Yorke said little to the crowd, but while getting ready for one song he asked How come it smells of doughnuts?¹ and wondered aloud who would be eating doughnuts at a time like this. It was one of his rare attempts at small talk, says the unsigned review that WPGU, the student-run radio station at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, ran the next day.

The set ran to 25 songs and about two hours, opening quietly with “All I Need”. The reviewer found it a night of atmosphere more than volume, in a nearly full and reverent amphitheatre, with “Myxomatosis” and “Bangers + Mash” the moments the band cut loose. The review also describes chimes hanging from the stage scaffolding, caught by the lasers, Yorke at the piano for “Pyramid Song”, which opened the second encore, and a moment when he put his eye right up to a camera lens and blinked out at the crowd from the screens.

Setlist, Verizon Wireless Amphitheater, 14 May 2008