5. THE FLAMING LIPS, 28th June, Glastonbury Festival
“Close your eyes for a second, and then open them – you feel as though you’re on a serious LSD trip. Accompanied by numerous 6ft animals and two ‘permanent suns’, Wayne Coyne – white-suited and face covered in fake blood – is stood centre-stage leading a field of thousands in an impromptu version of ‘Happy Birthday’ for the five-year-old daughter of one of the T-shirt vendors.”
(Also seen at Birmingham Academy)

4. JANE’S ADDICTION, 7th November, Nottingham Rock City
“‘Ain't no wrong now, ain't no right / There's only pleasure and pain…’. The hedonist's credo, according to Jane's Addiction - a band who know what they're talking about. A band that have fucked anything that moves and snorted or injected anything that doesn't, and lived to tell the tale. … When the steel drums of 'Jane Says' bring the set to an end, the whole band line up at the front of the stage to bow and take the applause together. The theatricality of the whole show is encapsulated right there - we know we've witnessed a PERFORMANCE. If there really is only pleasure and pain, then the world was a much more painful place without them.”

3. LOW, 10th February, Birmingham Academy 2
“This is a band for whom superlatives were invented. Pretention, glitz and showmanship be damned - this is all about the stark, the fragile, the beautiful. It's all too easy to erect a huge wall of noise on stage behind which to hide. Watching Low, that defensive tactic starts to smack of downright cowardice. This trio are, by contrast, courageous enough to leave vast gaps and spaces in their songs. These are artists who, in the normal course of performing their music on stage, must ritually leave themselves utterly exposed and defenceless - they play at such a low volume and slow tempo that the slightest murmurings of conversation in the audience would be fatal. They seem to have an innate understanding of the power of interweaving light and shade, tone and depth, music and silence; indeed, on songs like 'Closer' and '(That's How You Sing) Amazing Grace' the silence really does speak loudest.”

2. SIGUR ROS, 29th June, Glastonbury Festival
“Everything – the sense of a gathering storm presaged by a few large raindrops, the falling dusk, probably even the leylines of legend – is in its right place so that it all makes perfect sense. As on ( ), the songs seem to flow seamlessly into one another, less discrete stretches of music than the constituent parts of a much larger whole. Consequently the performance itself seems to trace a narrative progression, starting slowly but gradually and gracefully building up through successive songs to a climactic peak, the final track from ( ), which erupts with volcanic passion to stunning effect. Comparisons with Mogwai – who, through their curation of the 2000 All Tomorrow’s Parties festival, introduced the UK to the band (and vice versa) – are not only inevitable but also, it must be said, favourable. As good as Braithwaite’s bunch of Buckfast-swilling noisemongers were, on this occasion they can consider themselves overshadowed and outdone: this is even more wondrous, even more awe-inspiring, and – crucially – even louder.”

1. RADIOHEAD, 28th June, Glastonbury Festival
“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.”