Radiohead picked Primavera Sound as their only Spanish date in 2016 and made the festival their first in five years.

Their presence dominated the huge Catalan gathering by the sea, with legions of fans begging for tickets outside with homemade signs and a few rare unwanted wristbands changing hands for as much as triple the face value of a weekend pass.

The Oxford quintet did enough to justify the fuss without ever really igniting the place. Their 20-song set jumped between eras and albums, with moments of hypnotic power jarring against tracks from Kid A which always sound better on headphones.

Four from new album A Moon Shaped Pool - Burn The Witch, Daydreaming, Decks Dark, Desert Island Disk - made for a melancholic and gentle opening, and left the 50,000-strong festival crowd silent and attentive.

The National Anthem was sludgy and felt rushed. Everything In Its Right Place, another from 2001’s Kid A, lost its subtle nuances cast out to the open air.

Talk Show Host, on the other hand, one of a number of unexpected and welcome leftfield choices, was clean and crisp. Paranoid Android and 2 + 2 = 5, filled with angst and immediacy, were unstoppable.

With more than a dozen stages on the Parc del Fòrum site, there was more to the festival than Radiohead, who played on the Friday evening.

A day earlier, over on the Primavera stage, Beak's trippy electronic psychedelia was the soundtrack to the setting sun.

If you'd closed your eyes you would soon have guessed it was the sideline of Geoff Barrow from Portishead and Robert Plant’s guitarist, Billy Fuller, with thick, fizzing, eerie bass, 1970s-era noodling on the keys and proggy vocals.

There were a few set list problems for the duo - “a bit like Spotify or Google”, said Barrow in his West Country accent - who soon solved bottomed the problem. “Shall we play Mono, the one that almost made it to UK radio or I Know, the upbeat, fuzzy disco one from the first album no one knows except for a few weirdos at the front? Yep, you're here to discover new music, we'll do that."

Destroyer pulled a sizable crowd to the Ray-Ban stage, which is the best spot on site, framed by a giant amphitheatre with high banks of seating and views out to the Mediterranean.

The Canadian group are led by Dan Bejar, a man who has had a long and successful career turning out snippets of first-rate indie, without ever really being able to sing. He had plenty of support on stage, with a tight and enthusiastic band including a top-notch brass section, but his vocals were weak and strained and he never appeared to check in. He’s a talented writer, though, and those classic lines from nostalgic soft rock jazz pop number Kaputt ("Wasting your days chasing some girls, alright, chasing cocaine through the backrooms of the world all night") summed up his frustrating insouciance.

Air’s electronic chill-out lit up the H&M stage with a set of slow-burn hits including How Does It Make You Feel and Cherry Blossom Girl. The French duo, dressed all in white as if they’d just hopped off a boat in the nearby marina, reminded why they are still regarded as downbeat pioneers by closing with three classics from 1998's Moon Safari - Kelly Watch The Stars, Sexy Boy, La Femme D’Argent - which still sounded fresh.

Tame Impala stole the opening night with an energetic and professional set to a huge crowd. The Aussies’ pen breezy Beach Boys-meets-MGMT nuggets and are the hottest festival booking right now. They suit the summer: laid-back, young, free, with only love on the mind, and not even a short power cut could stop the good vibes. Halfway through closer Apocalypse Dreams, the amps and mic went off and shortly after so did the band - only to come back on stage to finish the track in glorious style, with the whole crowd singing the chorus back to singer Kevin Parker.

Primavera’s attraction is the variety – there was thrashy girl group Savages, all in black and with the loudest amps on site, whose frontwoman Jehnny Beth knows how to work a crowd but needs a lesson in how to crowdsurf; Pusha T (pictured), the pumped and prodigious US rapper and Clipse member, whose energy and attitude whipped the Pitchfork stage into a frenzy; and Moderat, the German electronic supergroup comprised of Modeselecktor’s Gernot Bronsert and Apparat’s Sascha Ring, whose triumphal techno closed the Heineken stage as well as a magical summer festival.