Thursday 03/07/08 Radiohead, MGMT @ Roskilde Festival, Denmark

“I hope the rest of the bands playing later on have the same experience we’re having,” blue-eyed Kings Of Leon frontman, Caleb Followill, announces to a sunsoaked and smiling crowd, “because you guys are awesome.”

Despite it being the eternal cliché that every band enjoys lavishing on a receptive audience – “This is the best gig we’ve ever played!” – there does seem to be remarkably high levels of crowd congratulating and unabashed gushing on the part of the artists at Roskilde.

So what is it about Roskilde that makes it deserving of such high praise? Maybe it’s the sweltering weather, the sunshine that seems forever elusive at British festivals. Or maybe it’s that European air of laissez-faire that saturates the relaxed atmosphere. But what really sets Roskilde apart is the people.  The Danes are so genuinely good natured that it’s almost impossible not to feel completely at home here.  Within seconds of setting up camp Gigwise has been offered a chair under the nearest gazebo and invited to join in a drink to toast the festival.  We can’t stop for long though, as there’s also a high-calibre line up that’s not to be missed over at the festival arena…

It seems only right to inaugurate oneself at a Danish festival with a Danish band, so we wander over to the Pavilion – one of six stages – to catch The Choir Of Young Believers.  The program would have us believe that Danish Jannis Noya Makrigiannis’s expanded one-man project cements him as one of the best singer-songwriters of our time, but it’s difficult to find the substance in tonight’s set to merit such a description.  His songs are in English, but with such ubiquitous use of clichés, which pervades and dampens otherwise well orchestrated folk-pop, we begin to with they were sung in Danish if only to make it less nauseous.

There’s lyrical ingenuity to spare a little later on at MGMT’s set, however.  The New York duo get off to a slow start, but half an hour in a rousing rendition of ‘Electric Feel’ has everyone dancing and from then on it’s one long psychedelic glam-rock mash up.  The highlight is the hypnotically addictive ‘Kids’, for which frontman Andrew VanWyngarden dons a technicoloured tie-dyed cape that Joseph would’ve been proud of.

For a high proportion of festival-goers, the highlight of the weekend line-up comes early, as Radiohead headline the orange main stage at 10pm.  Britain’s finest musical export are on fine form as ‘15 Step’ announces them on stage just as the sun creeps lower on the horizon.  Their set is comprised mostly of ‘In Rainbows’ interspersed with some revisited tracks from the mists of Radiohead time, including ‘My Iron Lung’, ‘Street Spirit (Fade Out)’, and ‘Exit Music’.  Despite an early glitch during ‘There There’ the sound system delivers magnificently, and the audience couldn’t be better behaved, hushed in respectful awe during ‘Nude’, and happily dancing and singing along to uptempo numbers like ‘2+2=5’, which makes a rare appearance on the set-list.  There are two encores, but tonight enough just isn’t enough, as Yorke encourages a sing-a-long ‘Karma Police’ to end the set and we filter out into the festival arena, dust covered and dreamy.

There are limited late night goings on pre-arranged in the program, but it’s soon clear that this facilitates a vibrant campsite culture.  Each group of tents has their own bespoke soundsystem – a homemade speaker on wheels powered by car batteries – and we gather under the gazebo to make new friends and share stories, only retreating to our canvas cubby-holes when forced to by the midnight chill to get a few hours shut-eye before day two.

Radiohead in live action at London's Victoria Park: