The Smile play their first shows to an audience in London

The Smile have played their first concerts in front of an audience, three shows in the round on 29 and 30 January at Magazine London, a new venue on the Greenwich Peninsula. Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood and Tom Skinner had played once before, for Glastonbury's Live at Worthy Farm stream last May, with nobody there to watch.

Each show was streamed live for a different part of the world, starting at 8pm on Saturday, 1am on Sunday and 11am on Sunday, London time. Paul Dugdale directed the film for Driift, and ticketholders can watch the streams again for 48 hours from 2pm on Sunday. At the 11am show Yorke told the crowd It's time for my breakfast.⁴

The set was songs from the trio's coming album and a few older Yorke songs. “Skirting on the Surface” goes back to October 2009, when Yorke played it alone at the piano at the Echoplex in Los Angeles; Radiohead played it on their 2012 American tour, but it has never been released. “Open the Floodgates” was in that 2009 piano spot too. The first show ended with “Just Eyes and Mouth”, and the other two with a cover of Joe Jackson's 1979 hit “It's Different for Girls”.

Before the band came on, a recorded voice read from William Blake's poem “The Smile”; the band's name comes from a different poem of that title, by Ted Hughes. The trio stood inside a circular cage of LED strip lights, which turned red for “The Smoke”, and NME counted about 1,000 people seated around them at the third show.

Yorke and Jonny swapped between bass, guitar and keyboards. On “Speech Bubbles” Jonny played harp and a piano line at once, and he bowed his bass for the drone that opens “A Hairdryer”, barefoot. Halfway through the third show the band lost the rhythm for a moment, and Yorke shouted Second verse!?⁴ before they found it again. Colin Greenwood was in the audience at the first show, and PJ Harvey came over the weekend.

Alexis Petridis, reviewing the second stream for the Guardian, called it intriguing more than dazzling, full of ideas that don't always come together. Edoardo Vitale in Rolling Stone Italia took the shows as proof that The Smile are a working band rather than a one-off, which leaves Radiohead's listeners a longer wait.

At the end of the first show Yorke told the crowd This has been all too brief. When we've written some more, we'll do some more, but we haven't written any more… yet.¹

Setlist, third show (Sunday 30 January, 11am)