Labiahead, an all-woman Radiohead cover band, play In Rainbows in New York

Labiahead, an all-woman Radiohead cover band fronted by the Tony winner Lena Hall, played In Rainbows in full to a sold-out Le Poisson Rouge in the West Village on Sunday 28 June, near the end of Pride month.

The band began as a joke list. About two years before The New York Times profiled them in February, Hall went with her friend the actor Darren Criss to see Guns N' Hoses, a Guns N' Roses cover band. Afterwards its guitarist, Charlene Kaye, was naming other cover bands she wanted to start, among them an all-woman Radiohead band called Labiahead, and Hall volunteered to sing. If you need a Thom Yorke, I'm your girl.¹

Hall, 46 and then starring in the Apple TV series Your Friends & Neighbors, has been a Radiohead fan since she found The Bends at 18. In 2016 she sang their songs at the Carlyle on the Upper East Side with Michael C. Hall (no relation), her co-star in Hedwig, and two years later she recorded Obsessed, an EP of Radiohead songs that includes “High and Dry” and “Creep”. Her audition for Ali Cooper, the troubled sister of Jon Hamm's character in the series, included “Fake Plastic Trees”.

Kaye, who calls herself a musician comedian, plays alongside Meg Toohey on guitars and synths, Lexi Bodick on bass and Paige Durr on drums. In the Times profile, the band has grown past a side project into a place for women who play rock to meet.

At Le Poisson Rouge, Blair Smith, writing for The Persistent, found the room mostly women and queer fans, and the album broken up by Pride jokes and comedy at the band's expense. Hall, in a red bondage-styled teddy and wide jeans, introduced herself as the first-ever perimenopausal pop star, and the crowd called the band back for encores.