Radiohead play the O2 twice, with four drummers on “There There”

Radiohead played two nights at the O2 Arena in London on 8 and 9 October, their first concerts in the city since 2008. They followed Manchester on 6 October, the only other date of the tour's British leg. On the first night “There There”, in the second encore, had four people drumming: Phil Selway, the touring drummer Clive Deamer, and Jonny Greenwood and Ed O'Brien on small kits of their own.

In the Observer, Kitty Empire tells how Thom Yorke, a day after his 44th birthday, had to stop at the start of “The Daily Mail” because he was laughing, then called the paper a quality newspaper². The unreleased “Identikit”, first played at the tour opener in Miami in February, was sung by Yorke and O'Brien together, and Empire rated it the most accessible tune the band had written in some time. “Like Spinning Plates” came as a piano ballad.

The first night's set leaned on The King of Limbs, but also found room for “Kid A” and “Climbing Up the Walls”. “Karma Police” was followed by “Feral”, which Alexis Petridis, writing in the Guardian, calls an instrumental, scattered rhythm under looped voices and electronic noise. At one point Yorke asked the crowd Are you lost yet?¹ Petridis saw them rapt instead, with hardly a phone held up to film. During “15 Step” the dozen or so screens hanging over the band lay flat, a roof of light hung low over the stage.

On the second night “Airbag” came second, “Paranoid Android” closed the main set, and “Planet Telex” and “Street Spirit (Fade Out)” turned up in the first encore. Sixteen of the first night's 24 songs were played again. Andy Baber, in musicOMH, writes that for “Staircase” the screens were set out as a flight of steps. The second encore ended on “Everything in Its Right Place”, brought in by a sung passage of “True Love Waits”, and the night closed with “Idioteque” alone in a third.

Setlists, The O2 Arena, London