Westboro Baptist Church pickets Radiohead in Kansas City

Members of the Westboro Baptist Church picketed Radiohead's sold-out show at the Sprint Center in Kansas City, Missouri, on Sunday 11 March, and Nigel Godrich, the band's producer, posted a photograph of them on Twitter. Highlight of the tour so far… Being picketed by westboro baptist church this evening.. Hoorah!⁵

The church, a fundamentalist group from Topeka, Kansas, in a statement on its website, had dismissed the band as freak monkeys whose mediocre tunes keep people from thinking about God's wrath, and likened Radiohead to a moth quietly eating away at the nation's garment. Outside the arena its placards carried anti-gay slogans, one of them a slur beside a Union flag, and told the crowd it was going to hell.

It was Radiohead's first concert in Kansas City. The reviewer for KJHK, the local college station, put the crowd at 17,000. Their only earlier visit to the area was a club show at the Bottleneck in Lawrence, Kansas, in July 1995.

The set brought “Supercollider” and “How to Disappear Completely” into the tour for the first time, and “Myxomatosis” was squeezed into the first encore though it was not on the printed setlist. “Identikit”, one of the new songs first played on the tour's opening night in Miami, had a rougher time. Thom Yorke introduced it by telling the crowd it had been a very random day for the band⁶. The drummer Clive Deamer came in wrong, the band stopped, and Yorke introduced him to the crowd before they started again.

Halfway through the second attempt the house lights came up. The band looked puzzled, Yorke swore into the microphone, and when the lights went down again within a minute he suggested someone at the lighting desk had fallen asleep on it.

Setlist