Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood debut The Smile at Worthy Farm

Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood have a new band, The Smile. It played its first set at 11pm on Saturday in Glastonbury's Live at Worthy Farm, the livestream of sets filmed around the farm in place of this year's festival. The drummer is Tom Skinner, of the jazz group Sons of Kemet. The festival named them only that morning as the stream's unannounced special guests, slotted between Jorja Smith and Kano.

Yorke's introduction was a joke about the name, which comes from a poem by Ted Hughes; he had posted an image of the poem on Twitter on 19 May without explanation. Ladies and gentlemen, we are called ‘The Smile.’ Not the smile as in ‘ahh!’, more ‘The Smile’ as in, the guy who lies to you every day….²

Nigel Godrich is part of the project too. Yorke calls it a collaboration with him and the festival's announcement named all four, but Godrich did not play, and on stage The Smile were a trio.

The set took a little over half an hour, in a shed of corrugated metal under what looked like a parachute, with Yorke and Greenwood moving between guitars, bass, a Moog synthesiser and a Fender Rhodes. It opened with “Skating on the Surface”. Pitchfork's reviewers took it for Radiohead's older rock side cut down to three players, with a bounce in Skinner's drumming and an aggression in Greenwood's bass that was new from him. In France, Les Inrocks put that bass playing back in the Hail to the Thief years.

Setlist, Live at Worthy Farm, 22 May 2021