Given the phenomenal critical and commercial success of their latest album, In Rainbows, Radiohead have good reason to feel a sense of righteous satisfaction as the band approaches middle age.

Without having made the slightest concession to populist convention, the same five men who began the band in 1991 have become the only stadium-sized avant-garde rock group. And having made a career out of playing hard to get, they were not about to change tack last night, as they played to 40,000 fans on the first of two nights in Victoria Park, at the start of the British leg of their current world tour.

Arriving on a giant stage that was dressed to look like a cage with bars apparently made out of tubular bells, they began with 15 Step, the first of many songs from In Rainbows. With the bearded Thom Yorke’s voice sailing over the top of a gently coruscating rhythm, they settled in to the task in hand with a sense of studious dedication.

The mood turned more brutish as they moved on to Bodysnatchers, Yorke yelling about the vagaries of life in the 21st century in a manner that was curiously redolent of Mark E Smith of the Fall. There were no introductions and hardly any communication of any sort between songs. And while there were artful bursts of light, and some split-screen visuals that gave a vague impression of what the musicians were up to, there was certainly nothing to interfere with the aloof, almost austere delivery of the songs.

Hits were few and far between and the show contradicted the laws of big concert performances in so many ways that you wondered at times how they were getting away with it. Discordant, dislocated, deconstructed and physically distant, they still managed to mesmerise the huge audience.

“I get eaten by the worms and weird fishes,” Yorke crooned in an atonal drone as the fast, twitchy drum beat of Weird Fishes/Arpeggi gave way to the skittering electronica of The Gloaming and a ghostly green light enveloped the stage. Faust Arp had a more lilting feel, but proved equally impenetrable. Only when they moved on to There There did they begin to build a bit of conventional momentum, as Jonny Greenwood took off on a marvellously angular guitar solo.

This was followed by Just, the song recorded by Mark Ronson, and a stark reminder of the brilliant musical legacy of their early years. But it was only a brief respite before a return to the strange, doomy electronica of Everything in its Right Place.

Victoria Park, June 25; Glasgow Green, June 27; Old Trafford, Manchester, June 29 2008

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