Radiohead headline Best Kept Secret with no “Karma Police” or “Creep”

Radiohead headlined Best Kept Secret at Beekse Bergen, near Hilvarenbeek, on Sunday 18 June, and played 24 songs without “Karma Police”, “No Surprises” or “Creep”. They had played “Creep” two nights earlier in Monza. When the set stopped after “There There” and Sun Ra's “Bye Bye” came over the speakers, some of the crowd looked let down. Others were in tears in their friends' arms. Some in the crowd were fans in their twenties seeing the band for the first time after ten years of listening.

It was Radiohead's first Dutch festival show since Pinkpop in 2001, and they began it with “Daydreaming”. The field went silent. Timo Pisart, reviewing for 3voor12, the Dutch broadcaster VPRO's music site, wrote that he had never heard a festival crowd so quiet. “Everything In Its Right Place” was played softer than usual, and the first encore began with “Nude”, Thom Yorke spreading his arms wide. The screen behind the band showed one colour a song and rarely the band themselves.

There were louder stretches. Yorke danced furiously through “Myxomatosis” and the whole field went up for “Idioteque”, but Pisart liked the band best when they kept it small. He rated the sound as clear as any he had heard at a festival, clear enough to pick out each of Jonny Greenwood's snare rolls in “Bloom” and how differently the two drummers, Phil Selway and the touring drummer Clive Deamer, played each song. He called it the band's most introverted show in a long time, and the more impressive for it. His moment of the night was “Exit Music (For a Film)”, when the field went quieter still.

Setlist, Best Kept Secret, Beekse Bergen, 18 June 2017