Thom Yorke plays three new songs at a Green Party benefit in Cambridge

Thom Yorke played alone at the Cambridge Corn Exchange on Thursday 25 February, a benefit for Tony Juniper, the Green Party's parliamentary candidate in Cambridge. Three of his 19 songs had never been heard before: “The Daily Mail”, “Give Up the Ghost” and “Mouse Dog Bird”.

For “Give Up the Ghost” he recorded a vocal and a beat into a loop on stage and sang over them.

Juniper, who once ran Friends of the Earth, introduced him to a sold-out hall. The two are friends, and in December Juniper was with him at the climate summit in Copenhagen. Announcing the show on Dead Air Space, the band's blog, Yorke wrote that normally I wouldn't get involved in politics like this⁵, and put it down to friendship. and anyway he bought me a pint and twisted my arm. It's a slippery slope I know.⁵ Before “Like Spinning Plates” he told the hall he was sick of politicians not talking about green issues, when half the country supports them and has no one in Parliament.

He came without Atoms for Peace, the band he named that same day, and moved between piano, keyboards and acoustic and electric guitar, with the bass for “Harrowdown Hill”. Introducing a beat-driven “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi”, he joked: When I was a kid I used to go into a shop around here and switch on all the Casio keyboards. It sounded a little bit like this.¹

Early on he lost his way in “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi” and laughed while the crowd sang the lines for him. “Lotus Flower”, which he played alone at Radiohead's Haiti benefit in Los Angeles in January, was in the set, and so was “I Froze Up”, a song once heard in a Radiohead webcast, which he joked he had never played outside a bedroom.

He came back for two encores and closed alone on acoustic guitar with “True Love Waits”, asking the room to sing along because he forgets the words.

Setlist