The Smile play through broken machines at the Roundhouse

The Smile fought the equipment through the first of their two sold-out nights at the Roundhouse in Camden on Sunday 29 May; the second is on Monday. Jonny Greenwood's bass lost its signal at one point, a song or two ended raggedly, and the logged setlist has “Open the Floodgates” cut short by a sequencer.

Machines make mistakes. Almost as many as we do.

Thom Yorke¹

Thom Yorke said it from the stage.

The band came on to polite applause and a few cheers and opened with “Pana-Vision”, Yorke bent over a piano. “The Same”, the first song on A Light for Attracting Attention, moved to the start of the encore. Two songs the band have not released followed it: “Friend of a Friend”, also known as “People on Balconies” and first heard at the tour's opening night in Zagreb on 16 May, and “Just Eyes and Mouth”.

Andy Hill, reviewing the night for Clash, rates Yorke's voice better in the room than on record, and picks “You Will Never Work in Television Again”, with Robert Stillman joining the band to end the main set, as the best of the night. “Free in the Knowledge” went down well and had Yorke smiling. The crowd, mostly older men, stood still all the same, to music Hill thought was plainly made for dancing.

Setlist