Dan Snaith says Radiohead chose Caribou as their support themselves

Dan Snaith of Caribou says Radiohead picked his band as their support themselves. He was talking to Spin over a Skype video call from his London studio, in an interview mostly about Jiaolong, his first album as Daphni, out on Merge this week.

We were picked by them, not by their agent or their manager or somebody who thought, “This would be a good marketing ploy.”

Dan Snaith¹

For some festivals around Europe, he says, Radiohead's message to the organisers was We're going to headline, but you have to offer the set before us to Caribou¹.

Caribou opened in Mexico City and on the late-spring North American run, played the set before Radiohead's at Optimus Alive near Lisbon in July, and are with them again on the October arena dates in Manchester, London, Paris and Strasbourg. Everyone in Caribou is a long-time Radiohead fan, Snaith says, and the two Mexico City nights, to 60,000 people, were an experience the band will never have again.

Caribou began by playing their best-known songs in the shorter opening slot. Then they found Radiohead's audience more curious about other music than the fans of any other band that size, and now they are playing longer sets and mean to play stranger ones.