Radiohead play their four postponed Italian nights in one week

Radiohead have played the four Italian shows they put off after the Toronto stage collapse, all in one week: Rome on 22 September, Florence on the 23rd, Bologna on the 25th and Codroipo, near Udine, on the 26th.

The shows were first due at the turn of June and July. The band postponed them on 21 June, five days after the roof over their stage at Downsview Park in Toronto collapsed, killing their drum technician Scott Johnson. The new dates kept the same venues, with Caribou, Dan Snaith's band, still opening.

The Bologna show had been planned for Piazza Maggiore, in the city centre, until the earthquakes that hit the region in May sent it out to the Arena Parco Nord. There, in the middle of “Exit Music (For a Film)”, Thom Yorke told Jonny Greenwood over the microphone to switch his mic off, expletive included. Before “The Daily Mail” the crowd chanted Greenwood's name while Yorke played a short silent-film march on the piano. Piero Merola, reviewing for Kalporz, put the crowd at about 20,000 and kept count of Greenwood's slips: late to his guitar for “There There”, chords lost in “You and Whose Army?”, a muddle in “Idioteque”. The night ended with Yorke stretching “True Love Waits”, almost a cappella, into “Everything In Its Right Place”.

In Rome, at the Ippodromo delle Capannelle, Yorke made a sarcastic dedication of “The Daily Mail” to Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's former prime minister, and began the song alone at the piano. The next night about 30,000 people came to the Parco delle Cascine in Florence, where Yorke greeted them in comic-sounding Italian and led an acoustic “Karma Police” on guitar that the whole field sang. Florence also heard the unreleased “Identikit”, and a few bars of R.E.M.'s “The One I Love”, slowed right down, led into the closing “Everything In Its Right Place”.

About 10,000 people came to the park of Villa Manin at Codroipo, where a five-minute shower fell during Caribou's set and stopped before Radiohead came on. It was the only one of the four nights to get “The National Anthem” and “Street Spirit (Fade Out)”, and Chiara Ugosetti of Kalporz says the pair moved her to tears. The band came back for a third encore, “Idioteque”.

Setlists, Italy, September 2012