First the non-Radiohead stuff. We arrived in Glasgow to find that the incompetent <insert airline here>
had cancelled our flight to London, one advantage of this was a £5 food voucher which was quickly exchanged for a quality cooked breakfast. The down side was that we would have to take a later flight to London and leg in through the airport if we were going to get on the flight to Nimes in France. We did leg it but we still missed the flight. The best thing they had was a later flight to a different airport (perpingnon) about two hours away from Nimes. We took this and laughed as the airline had to pay well over £200 for a taxi to take us to Nimes.

We finally got to the Hotel to find nobody was around. After rudely awakening the owner and struggling to communicate to her that we had a reservation we finally got into the room to find that some twat had interpreted 'singles' as the bed preference into a double bed. I slept on the floor.
 

The day of the concert was spent walking around the town saying "cool there's that amphitheatre again"
until we found the venue and heard some music coming over the P.A. There were some people peering through the gates to see who was playing and then I saw the unmistakable figure of Jonny Greenwood standing next to a van. I tried to inform my friend of this but struggled to make much sense due to all the excitement. He finally realised why I was so breathless and we set about overcoming the small rail that stood between us and Jonny. John opted for a clumsy but calculated roll over the barrier whereas I selected a leap with one hand on the rail and the other clinging to my camera. With this obstruction out of the way we saw that Jonny was walking towards us with Tom on his left hand side. I seized the opportunity and stepped forward to shake hands with Jonny having mumbled "aright Jonny" or something. John exchanged greetings with Thom before we took some pictures of the whole band at the tour bus.
    Thom seemed to have gone back in the small van so we followed Colin and Jonny down a small side street which came out at their hotel. We didn't want to trouble them further so we just watched them going in and were about to leave when we saw Thom emerging from the Hotel. We waited as he worked something out with a French guy who was taking bags from the van, He perhaps worked for the Hotel or was the van driver. Thom rewarded our patient wait by responding in the affirmative when John asked him "Any chance of a picture Thom". He thought about it but perhaps detecting our Scottish accents and realising we'd travelled pretty far he replied "Mm go on then". These pictures can be seen on the main Radiohead page.
 

With nothing else to do we just hung about outside the venue until it was time to go in. During this time we heard the sound check. Talk Show Host and a new song I now know to be Optimistic were played. We missed the rest when we had to go and get some food, a cheese sandwich as much was our poor french could ask for.

The Que. to get in began about three hours before the gates were supposed to open. We were about three rows back but by the end of the wait we had been pushed back to about five or six rows back. We had some interesting conversations with American fans who were touring europe. Some busker was playing his guitar behind us and was recieving warm applause for what I regarded as a bad Jeff Buckley impression. Then the rain began pissing down on us, the conversations helped pass the time and without the friendly atmosphere and the promise of a Radiohead performance, I could have gone royally insane.

When the gates did open we slowly squeezed through the security who thoroughly checked us before allowing us past. We bought some T-Shirts and took our place near the front of the stage in the standing bit. After we decided to go and buy water to help us recover from our wait and help us survive the night we found our position to be slightly worse than we expected. Having weighed up the pro's and con's we decided to take seats in a good spot.

Laika were the support act and were received reasonably well by the crowd. Before Radiohead could take to the stage the rain decided to delay our wait even longer but this only added to the excitement and after the hour delay the whole place was buzzing with regular hand claps and singing.

Radiohead came on and played a blistering set which coupled with the setting made this by far the best gig I have ever attended.