Radiohead played a ‘surprise’ show at Glastonbury festival tonight (June 24), billed as ‘special guests’ on The Park stage.
Playing on the same stage frontman Thom Yorke and guitarist Jonny Greenwood performed an unannounced set on at the festival last year, the band were joined by an extra live member, Clive Deamer, who played as a second drummer.
The gig was Radiohead’s first full band show in the UK since 2009, and was only confirmed this morning. Thousands flocked to The Park for the show, forcing staff to cut off access to the area as it reached capacity.
Arriving onstage just after 8pm (BST), Yorke addressed the crowd by saying: “Hello, we’re called Radiohead. We’re going to try and do some ’Kings Of Limbs’ and shit. We’re still trying to figure out how to get people to sing along. Help us out.”
The band then played a set which leant heavily on their new LP ’The King Of Limbs’, with six tracks from that album aired, as well as ‘Staircase’, which they performed online last week. In terms of their pre-‘In Rainbows’ material, only ‘I Might Be Wrong’ and ’Street Spirit (Fade Out)’ were aired.
Yorke told the crowd that the band had only performed “so we could get free tickets” and thanked festival chiefs Michael and Emily Eavis a number of times. He dedicated ‘The Daily Mail’ to “all mellow, liberal, right-thinking people in the UK”.
Crowd member Jake Brancher, speaking to NME just after the show, said: “When we got here yesterday we heard snatches of rumours about it, a few people were saying Arctic Monkeys, a few were saying The Killers. But this morning everyone started saying it was definitely Radiohead. It was amazing, the new stuff sounded really good.”
