Radiohead headline the Pyramid Stage at a muddy Glastonbury

Radiohead closed the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury on Saturday night, and during “No Surprises” fireworks that nobody had planned went off.

Saturday's edition of the paper, which Select make for the festival, had promised songs from OK Computer and warned that Ed O'Brien had already fallen off the stage twice during “Just”. Colin Greenwood, deadpan, told the paper the band planned a large inflatable pig above the stage and a wall of polystyrene bricks to knock down in the last number, both borrowed from Pink Floyd. Thom Yorke made one promise. Well, I can guarantee I'll be throwing up with nerves 30 seconds before we go on stage¹.

They were billed on at 10.45pm, after Ray Davies, Cast, Dodgy and Ocean Colour Scene, and came on to a 1960s lounge-style intro tape. The site was deep in mud. Gareth Grundy, reviewing for the festival's daily paper, puts the crowd at 40,000 and the set at 90 minutes, and sees the mud as the real test of the band's ambition to play stadiums. They got through it, he says, with almost comic ease, and he takes the “new U2” label as an insult.

The rain held off through “Paranoid Android”, a song that asks for it. Yorke talked to the crowd with an easy intimacy, and Grundy found its hush astonishing.

Setlist