22.55, Main Stage

How do you follow that? Simple, really: by turning in the best performance of the festival, bar none. The reason tickets sold out in record time, RADIOHEAD could have ambled onstage and farted and still drawn a rapturous ovation, such is the esteem in which they are held by adoring fans and bands alike. This is being billed as a homecoming, after the spectacular triumph-over-mud that was 1997. Thankfully, though, instead of opting to thrill the crowd with their trouser trombone techniques, they sweep through a wonderfully majestic set that cements many times over their status as our most valuable national treasure. The set is predictably heavy on material from Hail To The Thief – ‘There There’ and ‘2+2=5’ get things underway in fine style, but the real pleasure is that less remarkable album tracks like ‘Sit Down, Stand Up’ and ‘Where I End And You Begin’ suddenly start to make a good deal more sense. There’s also plenty of room for older material, too, particularly from OK Computer – ‘No Surprises’ is radiant and ‘Lucky’ is dedicated to Thom’s longtime friend Michael Stipe, sat with his band at the side of the stage, just as spellbound as the rest of us. The twin pillars of the show, though, are ‘Fake Plastic Trees’ and ‘Idioteque’, the former inducing thousands of voices to join in and the sensational latter inducing an outburst of schizophrenic dancing. Having never seen the band live before, it strikes me that for a supposedly difficult and troubled artist Thom appears to be grinning to himself rather a lot, and at one point completely loses track of the setlist, sitting at the piano only to be told by Colin that he should have picked up his guitar. Might Mr Yorke have sampled some of the festival’s traditional chemical fayre before the show? The clue is there in his repeated between-song mumble of “Hash for cash”. On his way offstage once ‘Karma Police’ has finished, he pauses at the microphone and sings the line “For a minute there I lost myself, I lost myself”. Unaccompanied musically, it’s not long before he’s accompanied vocally. A Very Special Moment indeed.

And yet, and yet… Walking away, knowing I’ve just witnessed pure brilliance at work, I can’t help feeling, well, a tiny bit disappointed. It seems hypercritical and absurdly churlish to gripe, but… Curiously, for instance, there was absolutely nothing from Amnesiac. I mean, don’t get me wrong – I love ‘Climbing Up The Walls’, and tonight it sounded out of this world. But isn’t it quite a strange decision to play that and ignore ‘Pyramid Song’, ‘Knives Out’ and Amnesiac altogether? Reading the setlists for their recent gigs, I’d got my hopes up that we’d get one or possibly even both of ‘Subterranean Homesick Alien’ and ‘Exit Music’. I also can’t help thinking that the two most wired guitar songs, ‘Just’ and ‘Paranoid Android’ (still a remarkable single six years on) sounded a bit, I don’t know – rushed and ragged? It’s at this point, contemplating and reflecting out loud, that I’m told to shut up by friends, so let’s leave it like this: Radiohead were the best – but, from a personal perspective, they could have been even better.