Honey Townsend ventures inside Radiohead's Big Top - and is entertained royally

Radiohead have been working on their long-awaited - and eagerly anticipated - fourth studio album, Kid A, for practically two years. Now the wait is over.

Oxford's favourite sons embarked on their sell-out Big Top tour - which visits Belgium, Holland and France, as well as selected sites in the UK - at Tredegar Park, Newport, last weekend.

The band's much-hyped Big Top allowed everyone see the stage - and the overhead screens and the superb sound added to the spectacle.

But the strategically placed signs outside the Big Top which read: 'Radiohead politely request no crowd-surfing and no moshing during tonight's performance' raised a smile or two. How many of Radiohead's songs actually lend themselves to either?!

Performing a marathon set which clocked-in at almost two hours (including two encores) Radiohead proved that the long wait had been worthwhile.

Thom Yorke was - as usual - a man of very few words between songs. This was a bit of a problem. With brand-new material being profiled, the new songs are unfamiliar to fans. Coupled with Thom's reluctance to chat, this meant that it became a bit of a lottery attempting to guess what the new songs were called.

The opening song was a new one, entitled Optimistic- then it was in to more familiar territory with Airbag, followed by Karma Police. Favourites such as Street Spirit, Fade Out, No Surprises, Just and Lucky were interspersed with the new material - which hints that the band are going in a more keyboard-driven direction. The album's title track is such a keyboard-driven song.

He may be restrained when it comes to chatting - but Thom more than matched Johnny Greenwood's energetic displays while performing Idiotesque, even knocking his mic stand over as he pranced around with a tambourine, like a demented Ian Brown.

Such is the depth of Radiohead's material that nothing from Pablo Honey is performed tonight - the obligatory request from the audience for Creep during the encore is met by a cursory response of "not tonight" from Mr Yorke. We were treated to Fake Plastic Trees though.

Radiohead finished as they began, with a new song - closing with the soaring How To Disappear Completely. Which they did, leaving a stunned audience in their wake. Quite simply, this was a performance of poignant majesty.