Mar 12, 2012:

@nigelgod: Highlight of the tour so far… Being picketed by westboro baptist church this evening.. Hoorah! yfrog.com/nts5nrfj

@nigelgod: Freak monkeys with mediocre tunes.. New band concept. http://yfrog.com/es2pnaoj

While yes the focus of this blog is on the tweets of Chieftan Mew’s we couldn’t let these two tweets from Nigel Godrich go by, in one of the stranger stories to come out of Radiohead’s current tour the show in Kansas City makes the very first by the band to receive a picketing by the Westboro Baptist Church a organisation lead by Fred Phelps that calls Topeka, Kansas home and is infamous for picketing funerals of former military servicemen, schools and other events with homophobic hate messages.

Nigel links the following photo of the protest with his first tweet:

In 2009 the group where blocked from visiting the UK on grounds of inciting hatred. This is probably the reason for the anti-UK placards.

In recent years it seems the church have set their sights on picketing concerts, Last year The Foo Fighters where picketed at the same venue and took to performing a impromptu set on the back of a truck in response.

While in the WBC defense The Foo Fighters had recently released a song titled ‘Hot Buns’ featuring a video of the band as naked homosexual hillbilly’s their reasons for picketing Radiohead is a little.. ‘odd’ comparing Radiohead to a circus monkey and calls them “Freak monkey’s with mediocre tunes.” no.. seriously..

Nigel links the following screenshot taken from the WBC website to his 2nd tweet to prove it:

Interestingly they accuse the band of being ‘focused on lightness’ which puts them rather at odds with the overall view in the press of Radiohead being a overly ‘serious’ band. Maybe they took offense to the Lotus Flower videoclip or mistook the title of Creep as ‘Freak’? Either way fans have pointed to the protest as proof that the band have ‘made it’ in America.