The Smile play their whole album and five more at Chicago's Riviera

The Smile played every song on A Light for Attracting Attention at the Riviera Theatre in Chicago on Thursday 1 December, and five songs from outside it, 18 in all over about 95 minutes. Illinois Entertainer has the review and photographs. They are a little over a fortnight into their first North American tour.

If we played the whole record, the show would be over in 45 minutes.

Thom Yorke¹

Thom Yorke said it to bring in “Colours Fly”, one of four songs in the set the band have not released. “Bodies Laughing”, “Bending Hectic” and “Read the Room” were the others.

Yorke, Jonny Greenwood and Tom Skinner trade instruments between songs and in the middle of them. Yorke started “The Same” on bass with Skinner at a modular synthesiser, and Greenwood played harp as well as synthesiser on “Speech Bubbles”. Partway through “Free in the Knowledge” Skinner went from synth to drums and Greenwood from piano to bass. “We Don't Know What Tomorrow Brings” had a false start, and the band stopped so that Greenwood could pick up the right instrument, the bass, and began again.

Robert Stillman, who opened the show, came back to play bass clarinet on “Colours Fly” and saxophone on “Pana-Vision”, where he took the album's brass parts. For “Pana-Vision” stagehands wheeled an acoustic piano to the centre of the stage, and the room cheered at Yorke's first notes.

Yorke was at the piano again for “Open the Floodgates” in the encore, which went on to “Read the Room” and closed with his solo song “Feeling Pulled Apart by Horses”. Illinois Entertainer's reviewer dates that one to 2009, and in Chicago it came with a heavy new guitar part from Greenwood.

Setlist