Thom Yorke's band with Flea plays its first show, at the Echoplex

Thom Yorke's new band played their first show on Friday 2 October, a warm-up at the Echoplex in Echo Park, Los Angeles, two days before their two nights at the Orpheum Theatre. Alone on guitar after the Eraser set, Yorke played “Lotus Flower” for the first time anywhere, and introduced it as a song he might do with the band. SPIN took him to mean Radiohead.

Flea plays bass, Nigel Godrich keyboards and guitar, and there are two percussionists: the drummer Joey Waronker, and Mauro Refosco of Forro in the Dark. Its not that big, it'll be total chaos and its kind of a rehearsal but .. if you are near by..⁹, Yorke wrote of the club when he announced the show on Thursday evening on Dead Air Space, the band's blog. Tickets went on sale online at noon on the Friday, two per buyer and non-transferable. They sold out within minutes. One pair turned up on eBay that afternoon at $3,500 before the listing was pulled.

Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, Rick Rubin and Spike Jonze were in a crowd of about 600. Yorke greeted it with a welcome to the “rehearsal”, miming the inverted commas in the air with his fingers. The band played all nine songs of The Eraser, his 2006 solo album, in order. Flea started at the side of the stage and worked his way to the middle, picking up a melodica at one point. Randall Roberts of LA Weekly counted one slap of the bass all night. He thought the band improved on the record's programmed sounds, the bass lines Yorke had programmed himself included. When someone shouted for Lynyrd Skynyrd, Yorke raised both middle fingers and asked whether he should be playing Stone Temple Pilots too.

Then he sent the band off for a shower, as he put it, and played three new songs alone. Talk in the room carried over the quiet songs until Yorke turned on it. If you want to have a chat, go fuck off outside, all right?¹ The crowd cheered, then went quiet. He fumbled the opening notes of a couple of songs, the only sign, NME thought, that this really was a rehearsal.

The band came back for more new songs and the 2003 B-side “Paperbag Writer”. Yorke introduced “Judge, Jury and Executioner” as brand new, saying “brand” over and over. The night ended with both sides of his new 12-inch, “The Hollow Earth” and then “Feeling Pulled Apart by Horses”, its percussion played on a tree of small snare drums. He sweated through two shirts and smiled for most of the 90 minutes.

Setlist

The order is NME's; SPIN has “Paperbag Writer” before “Judge, Jury and Executioner”.