Radiohead headline Glastonbury's Pyramid Stage and wave off Theresa May

Radiohead headlined the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury on Friday 23 June, the first headline set of the weekend, and Thom Yorke saved his goodbye to the prime minister for the encore. “No Surprises” opened it, and its line about bringing down the government drew a huge cheer. As the song ended Yorke said, See you later, Theresa. Just shut the door on your way out.⁵ The field answered with “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn” to the tune of “Seven Nation Army”.

Theresa May had lost her majority in the general election on 8 June. Earlier in the night Yorke had shouted her slogan, “strong and stable”, in the middle of “Myxomatosis”. Otherwise he said little. The first time he spoke to the crowd between songs, before “Everything in Its Right Place”, he joked that the stage stood on a leyline. He thanked Michael and Emily Eavis for having the band on their farm, and told the crowd he would probably see them in other fields over the weekend. What a fucking great place this is. Ain't nothing else like it on earth.⁴

BBC Two and BBC 6 Music carried the whole set live, 25 songs in about two hours, taken from all nine of their albums. In April sound failures stopped their Coachella headline set; this one ran without a hitch. It fell on the day OKNOTOK 1997 2017, the twentieth-anniversary reissue of OK Computer, came out, and seven of that album's songs were played. Only “Daydreaming”, the opener, and “Ful Stop” came from A Moon Shaped Pool. Alexis Petridis, reviewing it for The Guardian, watched parts of the field thin out in the slower middle of the set until “Idioteque” lifted it.

It was Radiohead's fifth Glastonbury, counting an unannounced Park Stage set in 2011, and their third headline set on the Pyramid Stage, the first since 2003. Yorke told 6 Music this month that he nearly walked off during the 1997 headline set, weeks after OK Computer came out, when the monitors failed. Ed O'Brien told Radio 2 on the eve of this one that he had thought their poor 2003 set would be the last.

Palestinian flags went up in front of the stage as the set began, according to Fact. A group calling itself Radiohead 4 Palestine was at the festival and had tweeted the band that day asking them to cancel their show in Tel Aviv on 19 July. An open letter from artists had asked that of them in April. The band said nothing about it from the stage.

A fan's orange flag had been up at the Pyramid Stage since the afternoon demanding “The Bends”. The song never came, though “Street Spirit (Fade Out)” and “Fake Plastic Trees” from that album did. When “Karma Police” was over, Yorke stayed on and played its closing section again while the crowd sang it.

Setlist