We worshipped the sun at Stonehenge and money under Thatcher.

But none was as worthy of adoration as Radiohead's reluctant prophet and lead vocalist Thom Yorke, who communed with a crowd of 40,000 at Oxford's South Park gig on Saturday and told it like it was, writes Nigel Hanson.

After the mood had been masterfully subdued by a so-real acoustic blues set from genius American support act Beck, Yorke led his Oxford band onto its mega-volt homecoming altar and blew away the faithful in a galaxy of white light.

Searchlights around the arena lit up the night's storm clouds before converging in a pyramid-shape at the end, and we prepared to be beamed up. Even the heavy rain was irrelevant by then - except for the few who missed the point, and tried to keep it off with umbrellas.

Yorke clearly wanted to do Oxford justice; the band played for more than two hours and packed in a wedge of encores before closing with the essential Creep.

And always below the passionate intensity, the honest lack of conviction - the genuine outsider refusing to act like the world-famous star that he is.

"We're really nervous," he confided, halfway through.

He dedicated Paranoid Android to former Spice Girl Geri Halliwell, whom he said he'd met on a train, and launched venomously into "Please could you stop the noise, I'm trying to get some rest...Ambition makes you look very ugly".

"Bring down the government, They don't speak for us", he told his caucus on No Surprises. The 40,000 knew escape wasn't far away. Unselfconsciously, they sang along with anthemic choruses and waved cigarette lighters in the air. Freddie Mercury would have been impressed, but any sentimentality was always creatively shattered when the songs lurched into their hallmark anarchic brain-thrash interludes.

The excellent Wheatley three-piece Supergrass, who came on before Beck, looked small by comparison.

The gig was an instant legend and one which will hopefully spawn similar events in Oxford each summer.

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