Radiohead: The King of Limbs Tour

For Dawn's birthday present we attended a Radiohead concert the evening of April 11 at the HP Pavilion arena in downtown San Jose.

Dawn purchased these two tour items:

Crying minotaur: Dawn's is black with the grey minotaur's tee desgin

Purple bearhead dolman: 100% certified recycled plastic PET bottles and certified organic cotton

We parked at the Almaden Financial Plaza Garage at the corner of Almaden and W Santa Clara St via a recommendation on Yelp, for $10. A short walk later, we ate at the Bijan Bakery & Café, also per Yelp. :o) Very good!

Police controlled traffic and we passed this art installation featuring a half-windmill. We entered the arena without any problem and debated whether standing in line for merchandise. A passerby instructed us to walk further away from the entrance to find similar items, and we did. After failing to find the purple tee Dawn wanted at the first booth, we found it at a second one. With 15 minutes before the show, we elected to purchase the items rather than take the risk of not getting it afterward. By random chance, we chose the slow line, and heard the opening act (we thought Radiohead had started) begin to play. Finally, we reached the front of the line, made our purchase, and hurried to our seats. It turns out we could have waited. We sat in section Upper 228, Row 14, Seats 9 and 10:

Imagine a stage between the blue line and the faceoff circles....

At 20:30, Radiohead took the stage. The setlist:

1. Bloom
2. 15 Step
3. Morning Mr. Magpie
4. Kid A
5. Staircase
6. The Gloaming
7. The National Anthem
8. The Amazing Sounds of Orgy
9. Climbing Up the Walls
10. Karma Police
11. Identikit
12. Lotus Flower
13. There There
14. Feral
15. Little by Little
16. Reckoner
17. Encore: Separator
18. I Might Be Wrong (Tour debut)
19. Myxomatosis
20. Everything In Its Right Place
21. Encore 2: The Daily Mail
22. Planet Telex (Tour debut, first performance since 2009)
23. Idioteque

I thought the lighting and artistic video screens looked well done. One note: during the encore song "Everything In Its Right Place" the video screens showed the lyrics...it looked like they used Comic Sans. ;o) We remember the lyrics "Yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon...."

The show wrapped up sometime between 22:15-22:30, about a two hour performance.

We neglected to anticipate the place getting smoked up--marijuana and tobacco seemed fairly abundant and Dawn seemed visibly distracted during a few pieces. On a positive note, people had no problem getting up and dancing in our section. We both felt tired and fairly restrained, but appreciated the energy of others.

After the show, everyone exited peacefully. We passed someone dressed in a furry costume. Rain began lightly coming down as we walked. Street vendors sold delicious-smelling meats and older tour shirts. We left the parking lot out the back way onto W San Fernando, then south onto Market to 280 East—almost no traffic. :o)

Got home around 1:00...no incidents, a bit of rain made for some slowness but no problems.