The Smile play their first show in Greece, then Taranto

The Smile played their first concert in Greece at Release Athens on Thursday 20 June, and two nights later the Medimex festival in Taranto, where Thom Yorke talked to the crowd in Italian.

In Athens they shared the Water Plaza in Kallithea with Pulp, who headlined. They played 17 songs, opening with “Wall of Eyes” and ending with “Feeling Pulled Apart by Horses”, Yorke's 2009 single, with two songs still unreleased, “Instant Psalm” and “Don't Get Me Started”. Tania Skrapaliori, reviewing the night for Athens Voice, liked the light show and the sound but thought the set was wrong for a crowd that had largely come for Pulp, and many of them talked through it.

In Taranto on the Saturday about 6,000 people saw them on the Rotonda by the seafront near the Aragonese castle. The set drew on A Light for Attracting Attention and Wall of Eyes, opened again with “Wall of Eyes” and had no Radiohead songs; Yorke played bass on “Feeling Pulled Apart by Horses”, and the encore ended with “You Know Me!”. Giovanni Ansaldo, writing for Internazionale, thought “Instant Psalm” a little like the Beatles and counted “Bending Hectic”, ending in a wall of guitars and light, among the best moments of the night.

A Saharan dust cloud hung over the city that day. Yorke swore about the heat from the stage, telling the crowd it was not normal, and introduced the band in Italian. We are the Smile, the smile. The wicked smile.⁵

The end of the June leg