Radiohead play Glastonbury's Park Stage as special guests

Radiohead walked on to Glastonbury's Park Stage just after 8pm on Friday 24 June, billed only as “special guests”, and Thom Yorke introduced the band to a field that had to be closed once it was full. We're going to try and do some 'Kings Of Limbs' and shit. We're still trying to figure out how to get people to sing along. Help us out.¹

The Sun reported the booking first, and a band spokesperson confirmed it to NME only on the morning of the show. Earlier that week Emily Eavis had told NME that nothing was confirmed and that she had even heard a Led Zeppelin rumour, and on the morning itself the favoured guesses were Pulp and Kings of Leon.

It was the band's first show since the Haiti benefit at the Music Box at the Fonda in Los Angeles in January 2010, and their first full-band show in Britain since Reading in August 2009. Clive Deamer played as a second drummer. They played 14 songs in about 75 minutes, and only “I Might Be Wrong” and “Street Spirit (Fade Out)”, the encore, were older than In Rainbows. Clash has a gallery of photographs from the set.

Six songs came from The King of Limbs. “Bloom” and “Little By Little” were played live for the first time, and the band had never played the other four together in concert before. The same went for “Staircase”, which they had put online from their From The Basement session three days before, and for “The Daily Mail”, still unreleased, which Yorke had played on his own. He dedicated it to all mellow, liberal, right-thinking people in the UK¹.

Yorke joked that they had only played so they could get free tickets, and thanked Michael and Emily Eavis several times. U2 headlined the Pyramid Stage the same night, and it rained. Radiohead played the festival in 1994, and headlined it in 1997 and 2003; last year Yorke and Jonny Greenwood played an unannounced set on the same Park Stage.

The next night Yorke and Nigel Godrich DJed until dawn in the Fuselage, a club built inside a crashed plane in the Shangri-La area. Yorke later posted 17 of the tracks they played on Dead Air Space, the band's blog, with Major Lazer, DJ Shadow, Public Enemy and Modeselektor on the list.

The BBC's festival coverage did not show the set, but a full multi-camera video of it, about 80 minutes long with mastered sound and edited by James Clarke, has appeared online in the past few days. The band have now posted their own footage of “Bloom” on Dead Air Space, saying they loved playing Glastonbury and want to come back soon. Yes it rains at the end, and the wet smudges the lights and everything spins out nicely¹¹

Setlist, Park Stage, Glastonbury, 24 June 2011