Radiohead headline Rock Werchter after Sigur Rós

Radiohead closed the Saturday of Rock Werchter on 5 July, their fourth time at the Belgian festival after 1996, 1997 and 2003, with Sigur Rós on the main stage before them. Johan Meurisse, reviewing for Musiczine, remembered the two bands on the same grounds eight years ago, in the tent Radiohead brought to the Werchter Festivalpark for two nights in September 2000. Tomorrow night Radiohead headline the Main Square Festival in Arras.

They opened with “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi”, where Roskilde two nights earlier had begun with “15 Step”, and played 22 songs. The set ran from “Just”, the one song from The Bends, to all of In Rainbows except “House of Cards”. Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood played “Faust Arp” as an acoustic duo. The tour's LED screens showed the band from every angle, and through “You and Whose Army?” the camera held a close-up of Yorke's eye. He said little, but he smiled, and now and then offered a shy thank you very much¹.

Tom Weyn of daMusic called it the most beautiful evening Werchter has had and the best light show its writers had seen, and put the set at nearly two hours; Meurisse made it well over an hour and a half and praised its range. Festivalinfo noted that there were no crowd-pleasers and only one big hit, “Paranoid Android”, late in the encore. In Het Nieuwsblad on the Monday, Kristof Bohez named it the festival's most wilful concert: the crowd sometimes struggled to follow the new songs, but people stood listening all the way out into the street. The Gazet van Antwerpen reported fans fainting in the crush before Radiohead came on.

Setlist, Rock Werchter, 5 July 2008