Radiohead fill their Victoria Park tent three nights running

Radiohead finished three sold-out nights in their own tent in Victoria Park, east London, on Monday 25 September, a week before Kid A comes out on 2 October. The tent was billed as a brand-free zone, and the band urge fans to read Naomi Klein's No Logo, but Keith Cameron, reviewing one of the first two nights for the Guardian, spotted a big Budweiser lorry parked near the bar.

The tent is blue, with peaks and flickering red lights, and was designed for the band, who chose it for London over a residency at Wembley Arena. The nights were barely advertised and still filled all three times.

Cameron notes that the band spent 373 days on one song and then left it off Kid A. That song is “Knives Out”, which Ed O'Brien's studio diary saw finished in March, and it was played in the tent on the Sunday and the Monday. The crowd took the new material in their stride, as Cameron tells it; the older songs turned into singalongs, and next to “Morning Bell” and its shifting time signatures even “Paranoid Android” sounded simple. O'Brien and Jonny Greenwood relished the loud old songs, while Thom Yorke looked as if he would rather be somewhere else, yet threw himself into “Lucky”.

Eduardo Fabregat of the Buenos Aires paper Página/12 was there on the Sunday. He describes about 10,000 people singing “Karma Police” some 15 minutes in, and “Airbag” drawing the first big roar. Jonny played the ondes Martenot, an early electronic instrument, and on “No Surprises” picked out the music-box tune on a small vibraphone that looked like a toy.

When Yorke came back after “Everything In Its Right Place” with an acoustic guitar, Fabregat guessed “High and Dry” or “Fake Plastic Trees”; it was “Fake Plastic Trees”. The encores also held a new piano song, Yorke almost alone, which the setlist names as “Pyramid Song”; Fabregat reports it is one of the songs kept off Kid A for another record due early next year.

The three London nights