Radiohead to headline the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury 2017

Glastonbury named Radiohead on Thursday 20 October as the first headliner of its 2017 festival, closing the Pyramid Stage on Friday 23 June. It announced the booking with a picture of the band's bear logo marked out on the grass in front of the stage, and by then the logo had already given the secret away. On Wednesday the Glastocam, the BBC's webcam of Worthy Farm, showed the circle being marked out. DIY and Dork both read it as a headline booking on the way, while some watchers on social media took it for Mickey Mouse.

It will be the band's third Pyramid Stage headline set, after 1997 and 2003. The 1997 set, played in deep mud and rain less than a fortnight after OK Computer came out, has topped polls of the best Glastonbury sets. Since 2003 they have come back only off the main bill: Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood played an unannounced set on the Park Stage in 2010, and the band played a secret set on the same stage in 2011, which drew one of its biggest crowds.

The festival runs from 21 to 25 June, and its tickets sold out in minutes, before a single act had been named. There will be no Glastonbury in 2018, a fallow year for the land. The Pyramid set will be Radiohead's first British show since three nights at the Roundhouse in London in May.

Later the same day the band announced a night at Open'er Festival on Wednesday 28 June, five days after Glastonbury, at Kosakowo airport outside Gdynia in Poland. They are the first act named for the festival, and for now the two are their only dates of 2017. Radiohead have never played Open'er, but Jonny Greenwood has, twice: in 2012, when the AUKSO orchestra played his music alongside Krzysztof Penderecki's, and in 2015 with soloists from the London Contemporary Orchestra.

A week before the announcement Ed O'Brien, who goes to the festival every year, told Matt Everitt on BBC 6 Music that he would love the band to be asked back for the 20th anniversary of the 1997 set. Glastonbury for us is kind of like our spiritual home. It is the mother of all festivals¹⁴, he said. Emily Eavis, who organises the festival, told the BBC the booking was about as good as it gets. Some of my happiest memories at the festival have been watching them play, from headlining in the rain 20 years ago when I was a teenager¹¹, she said.

Radiohead at Glastonbury