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The Smile play their first US concert in Providence
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Photo: Raph_PH · CC BY 2.0 · Wikimedia CommonsThe Smile played their first concert in the United States on Monday 14 November, at Veterans Memorial Auditorium in Providence, Rhode Island, on the opening night of their first North American tour. Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood and the drummer Tom Skinner stood in a row across the stage, with Greenwood in the middle.
They played 18 songs. Every track on A Light for Attracting Attention was there except “Open the Floodgates”, alongside five that have been in the live set for a while without reaching a record. One of those, “It/Flangers”, was missing from the printed setlist. Robert Stillman, who plays on the album and is opening every night of the tour, came out for “Colours Fly” and for “You Will Never Work in Television Again”, which closed the main set.
The American dates have sold out. On Thursday 17 November the band make their first appearance on American television, on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.
J.M. Martinez, who photographed the night for V13, says that when Yorke and Greenwood introduced the band they joked about how few songs it has, so the room knew there were three or four to come at most. The encore began with the album's opening track, “The Same”, went on to “Bending Hectic”, first heard at Montreux in July, and ended on “Feeling Pulled Apart by Horses”, which Yorke put out as a solo single in 2009.
Setlist, Veterans Memorial Auditorium, Providence, 14 November 2022
| No. | Song | Note |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Pana-Vision | – |
| 2 | Thin Thing | – |
| 3 | The Opposite | – |
| 4 | It/Flangers | not on the printed setlist |
| 5 | Speech Bubbles | – |
| 6 | Free in the Knowledge | – |
| 7 | A Hairdryer | – |
| 8 | Waving a White Flag | – |
| 9 | Colours Fly | with Robert Stillman |
| 10 | We Don't Know What Tomorrow Brings | – |
| 11 | Skrting on the Surface | – |
| 12 | Just Eyes and Mouth | – |
| 13 | Bodies Laughing | – |
| 14 | The Smoke | – |
| 15 | You Will Never Work in Television Again | with Robert Stillman |
| E1 | The Same | – |
| E2 | Bending Hectic | – |
| E3 | Feeling Pulled Apart by Horses | Thom Yorke single, 2009 |