Radiohead headline Coachella after a day of rumours they had pulled out

Radiohead headlined the opening Saturday of the fifth Coachella festival, at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, California, on 1 May, the last date of the Hail to the Thief tour. Jessica Suarez and Mark Sussman, reviewing the weekend for the Arizona Daily Wildcat, found the polo field full of talk that Thom Yorke had lost his voice and the band had withdrawn, with the Beastie Boys or David Bowie named as the stand-ins. Neither was true.

Four days earlier the band had cancelled their last Australian date, the second night at Rod Laver Arena in Melbourne, after a specialist found Yorke's vocal cords badly swollen, and word spread that Coachella might go too.

It is the band's only North American show of 2004. Goldenvoice, the festival's promoter, had been trying to book Radiohead since the first Coachella. About 50,000 people came each day, and for the first time in its five years Coachella sold out.

On a day of over 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the desert, the reunited Pixies, at their first festival, played an hour on the main stage just before Radiohead. Radiohead opened with “There There” and played 20 songs, six of them from Hail to the Thief. Yorke was croaky between songs and kept his voice low, but his singing held. The encore brought “You and Whose Army?”, a rare “Planet Telex”, “Creep” and “Everything in Its Right Place”, and only at the very end of the set did his voice start to give.

Setlist