Rolling Stone, 16.10.97

Dream Weavers
by Matt Hendrickson

On their fantastic voyage, OK Computer, Radiohead blast off into uncharted territories - and take a new generation of fans along for the ride.



EL CHOLO, a popular Mexican restaurant located smack in the middle of Los Angeles' Koreatown, has the sort of kitchy decor that's part Southwestern stucco and part basement rec room: cheesy wall ornaments, table-top video games, worn couches. The din is intense tonight: Amid a symphony of clinging glasses, one group is screeching "Happy Birthday to You", while the women at a nearby table are hooting and hollering, and various drunken professional types are sitting at the long wooden bar, turning happy hour into a liquid dinner.

Radiohead guitarists Ed O'Brien and Jonny Greenwood survey the pandemonium with bemused looks. "This is insane", says O'Brien, who, at 6 feet 4 inches tall, towers above the rest of his band. "I'm going to the bar". Margaritas are ordered for everyone except Greenwood, who requests an espresso. Just as O'Brien returns with drinks in hand, singer and guitarist Thom Yorke arrives at the restaurant and, with a look of mock horror on his face, quickly finds a seat in the adjacent lounge as far away from the fracas as possible. His band mates follow close behind him. As he takes his seat, Yorke grabs a friend's jet-fuelled margarita and exclaims "What...is...this?" He takes a sip. "Yeow", the scrawny singer yells, shaking his head. "I think I'll be having one of those".

Radiohead have chosen El Cholo as the place for an impromptu kickoff dinner for their North American tour. Given the downpour of accolades for their latest album, OK Computer, and the sold-out performances, it would be understandable if the band's mood was fraught with nervous excitement. In fact, the complete opposite is true. Despite serious jet lag, the group's members - all but drummer Phil Selway, Radiohead's eldest member at 30, who rarely ventures out after dark - are in a jovial mood, making jokes about the Spice Girls and devouring enchiladas and burritos. Sold-out tour? Rising superstars? Shut up and pass the guacamole.

Chalk up Radiohead's laissez-faire attitude to experience. This is one of the few bands in recent years to surf a brief wave of post-Nirvana success, watch it die and then paddle out again in search of the big one. Until now, Radiohead were best known for their 1993 hit, "Creep" (the sarcastic, self-deprecating baby brother to Nirvana's "Negative Creep"), which helped their first album, Pablo Honey, to sell nearly 800,000 copies. Subsequent singles from that release were given scant attention, and the band was relegated to the one-hit-wonder bin by the time of its second album, The Bends, in 1995.

The Bends was more expansive and intricate, both sonically and lyrically, than Pablo Honey, but it sold only half as well. Then, due in large part to Radiohead's relentless touring, (they crisscrossed America five times), a burgeoning reputation for electrifying live shows and the moderately successful single "Fake Plastic Trees", the band crept toward renewed popularity by the end of the record's run, headlining theaters and large clubs. Capping off the hard-earned comeback was a string of dates opening for Alanis Morissette, during which Radiohead tested new material - including a 10-minute, hair-raising version of their current magnum opus, "Paranoid Android".

The stage was thereby set for OK Computer to be Radiohead's breakthrough. And while it still may be - the record debuted at No. 21 on the Biillboard chart but fell somewhat in subsequent weeks - the album is certainly not what people expected. OK Computer is a glorious piece of moody, spaced-out art-rock madness that alternates between compassionate, twisted tracks like "Climbing Up The Walls" and "Exit Music (For A Film)" and prickly, aural thorns such as "Airbag", which require numerous listens. "Women have told me they think the record is romantic", says gregarious bassist Colin Greenwood, Jonny's older brother. "I think that's pretty cool". Despite its popularity, OK Computer's sense of adventure was actually Radiohead's big "fuck you", a piss into the wind of success. "Everyone said, 'You'll sell 6 or 7 million if you bring out The Bends, Part 2'", O'Brien says. "And we're like, 'Yeah, right.' But we're not going to do that. The one thing you don't want to say to us is what we should do, because we'll kick against that and do exactly the opposite".

RADIOHEAD have been going against the tide from the beginning. Thom Yorke, who was born in 1968, moved with his family from Scotland to Oxford, England, when he was 8 years old. At the age of 10, he formed his first band, an unintentionally arty pop duo: Yorke played guitar while a friend smashed televisions. Yorke's aggression would play out in more constructive ways after his difficult stint at a boarding school in nearby Abingdon, where he was picked on and frequently engaged in fistfights, which he usually lost. Yorke spent ever-increasing amounts of time in the school's sound-proofed rehearsal rooms, teaching himself to sing. He soon joined a punk band, TNT, which featured one of his schoolmates, Colin Greenwood, on bass. After leaving that band, Yorke formed his own group with O'Brien, invited Greenwood to join them, christened the band On a Friday and added drummer Selway to the fold. Jonny was reluctantly made a full-time member after he waited patiently at the lip of the stage, harmonica in hand, during On a Friday's first gig, in 1987.

Soon after, the band was put on hold as each member went off to a different university. Yorke enrolled at Exeter, where he studied English literature and fine arts - and resumed his fighting career. "I was going out to a club one night, and these blokes just descended on me", he says, "just because I blew them a kiss". While at Exeter, Yorke played guitar in a techno outfit called Flickernoise and joined the university's anti-fascism club, which would hold demonstrations outside the town's European-football stadium. Unbeknown to his club's member's, the supporters of the local football team - who also happened to be members of the racist National Front organization - would take pictures of Yorke and his cohorts, from which they could later be identified. "We'd be sitting in the pub, and these skinheads would come up and start fucking with us", Yorke recalls. "It wasn't a pleasant experience".

After college, the members of On a Friday regrouped, in 1991, and renamed themselves Radiohead (the band name comes from a song on Talking Heads' True Stories). Following a few gigs in Oxford, they landed a record deal with Parlophone. The rage that had been seething within Yorke since childhood found its way into his tortured lyrics on Pablo Honey. With songs that were more musically focused and cohesive, Yorke's anger and disgust only intensified on The Bends.

In 1995, Yorke said in an interview in ROLLING STONE, "People ask me if I'm happy, and I tell them to fuck off". The singer was promptly anointed in the U.K. press as the Next Artist Most Likely to Put a Bullet in His Head. Now, he is more reflective. "The downside [about The Bends] was that everything I wrote had this significance to it", he says. On OK Computer, Yorke has replaced his earlier raw, confessional lyrics with a more oblique, universal discomfort; the songs seem to come from the perspectives of different characters, who comment on society. "I'm not trying to fight people in the same way [that I used to]", he says. "A lot of that was misplaced anger directed in the wrong way - toward myself. You say all these things, and you realize that you're revealing things that you really shouldn't be saying to anybody, except the people you really, really love".

Yorke's band mates defend him, saying that his misery has been overemphasized. "People try to pin this persona on him that has nothing to do with him", says Colin Greenwood.

A self-described perfectionist and control freak, Yorke is also a moody codger. In a matter of minutes, his demeanor can run from caustic crankiness (often displayed by burying his head in his hands) to unexpectedly charming. It is this unpredictability that drives his band mates, who feed off the singer's mania and channel it into an explosive, complex and melodic mix of guitar rock and electronica.

Yorke's control is not lost on the rest of the group. "Thom uses a great analogy", O'Brien says. "We're like the U.N. and he's like the U.S. He is the communicator, and the pressure on him is enormous".

The members of some bands might be resentful about such behavior, but Yorke's mates tend to stand by their man. They are a tightknit lot who all live within minutes of one another in Oxford. Yorke is also supported by a group of close friends from college, including his girlfriend of more than six years. "She's doing her doctorate in Dante's illustrations to The Inferno", he says proudly. He recently bought a house in Cornwall, England, that he uses as a sort of club-house. It has plenty of beds to accommodate his friends, who are not overly affected by his stardom. "When I go home, we talk about what's going on for five minutes, then everything's back to normal", he says. "It's as exciting for them as it is for me. They see me as happy, and that's cool".

UNDER a hot sun in L.A.'s San Fernando Valley, the members of Radiohead are sitting in the production lot of Burbank's NBC Studios, waiting to perform on The Tonight Show. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. "I am so fucking bored", announces O'Brien, thumbing through the New York Times. The only member who is not going out of his mind is Colin Greenwood, who plops down on the curb and rummages for a cigarette. "I'm quite enjoying not thinking about anything at the moment", he says. Colin is two years older than Jonny, and the two couldn't be more different. With his big brown eyes, pouty lips and flailing, chain-saw-starting guitar moves, Jonny exudes the most onstage rock-star charisma, while Colin prefers to anchor himself by Selway's drum kit, delicately chugging to the beat. Offstage, the roles reverse. Colin is open, friendly and chatty, the one most likely to go out on a bender, while Jonny is quiet, self-absorbed and often at bed by 11. Despite their opposite personalities, Colin and Jonny remain close. Colin recalls only one fight in their relationship. "Jonny is colorblind", he begins, "and when we were young, I gave him a red crayon to use for the grass he was drawing. It was a blood bath". Their father died when Colin was 7, leaving Jonny and him to look to their older sister, Susan, as a role model. "she's responsible for our precocious love of miserable music", Colin says. "The Fall, Magazine, Joy Division. We were ostracized at school because everyone else was into Iron Maiden".

Colin is nonchalant about Radiohead's success. "Enjoy it while it lasts", he says as he spots a giant limo carrying another one of Jay Leno's guests, Evander Holyfield. "The record company always wants to send us limos", he continues. "I hate them. It's much better to have a van. There's no cachet anymore with limos. What's the point?"

The band's tour manager hands Colin an itinerary for his girlfriend, who will visit him in two days. "One of the benefits of being successful", he says with a crooked grin, "is flying someone you care about across the country. That's nice".
After the band's abrasive performance of "Electioneering" on The Tonight Show, the hallway of the NBC studio degenerates into a hellish fun house of celebrities. The group retreats to its dressing room, dodging Ed McMahon, Arsenio Hall and Magic Johnson. The Arsenio sighting brings up a discussion about which talk-show host gives the better gifts. "Arsenio gave us great bathrobes", says Colin. "We get food baskets from Jay".

All the band members leave the dressing room except for Selway, who stands and looks at the baskets. "I suppose it would be rather rude to leave them", he says. The comment underscores Radiohead's greatest collective character traits. They're polite, thoughtful and charmingly down-to-earth - the exact opposite of fellow Brits Oasis, whose bratty, headline-making antics far overshadow Radiohead's in the U.K. Thus, Selway gathers up the baskets, heads outside to the parking lot and gives them to the limo drivers.

In the lot, things get off to a strange start. Kato Kaelin - remember him? - is milling around the parking lot with a woman at his side. "Oh, yes, that guy", exclaims O'Brien rather loudly. "Should I go get his autograph?" Kaelin shoots a glare in the band's direction. Everyone stares in silence. After a few tense moments, Jonny mutters, "Nice hair, though".

Alarmingly, Yorke once had hair similar to Kaelin's. Around the time of "Creep", Yorke's gaudy blond tresses were a frightening collision of English mod meets L.A. glam. These days, Yorke has settled on a buzzed, spiky look, which today is dyed black.

After the band's performance at L.A.'s Wiltern Theater the following evening, Yorke jumps into a car and crawls into the back, slouching down low. "You're probably going to be followed", he informs the driver. "You know how to lose people, don't you?"

Yorke is on the way to a private after-show party, at a restaurant in West Hollywood, that was organized by R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe. Since Radiohead opened for R.E.M.'s 1995 Monster tour, Stipe and the rest of the band have become big brothers to Yorke and Co., offering advice on how to navigate the potholes on the road to fame."We were a different band after we toured with R.E.M.", O'Brien says. "They did it their own way, and we spoke about that as the way that we wanted to do it; go out there and gig, and win a few more people over on each album. Then when we met them, they really seemed to enjoy the position they were in, and they were being creative. It was really important for us to see that." Yorke and Stipe have since formed a tight bond. Before this evening's show, they even went shopping together, which nearly caused Yorke to be late for Radiohead's gig. "He's a good friend", says Yorke of Stipe. "He's been very helpful".

Yorke arrives at the open-air restaurant and shuffles in with his hands stuffed into his pockets, a sheepish grin on his face. Seated at the long table is a motley collection of rockers (Stipe, Mike D of the Beastie Boys, Hole's Eric Erlandson) and actors (Liv Tyler joined by three of the Phoenix siblings: Joaquin, Summer and Rain). Yorke settles into a chair, accepts a glass of champagne and orders french fries and a salad.

Yorke receives congratulations with a smile and a nod, and instead of working the room, chitchatting with the celebs, he stays in his chair, quietly eating his midnight meal and politely answering questions ("I'm running out of people to get star struck over", he will say later). Only after the plates are cleared does Yorke excuse himself to huddle one-on-one with Stipe. After an hour, the tour bus arrives to pick up Yorke for Radiohead's overnight trip to San Francisco. He says goodnight to Stipe, turns and gives a wave to the rest of the party, and saunters off, half-drunk and smiling.

A MONTH after the tour began in California, the Radiohead juggernaut has made its way to Philadelphia. By all accounts, it has been a success, and, according to O'Brien, last night's Boston show was the best gig they've played yet ("Aerosnith, eat your hearts out", he boasts jokingly). Joined on their tour bus by openers Teenage Fanclub for the drive to Philly, the bands tie one on until 5a.m.

Understandably, there's a feeling of lethargy hanging in the Electric Factory, a blade Runner-like venue just north of Philadelphia's Independence Hall. The band plays an average gig by its standards, but it does nothing to tarnish its reputation as one of the best live rock acts. Yorke's voice is still in unbelievable shape, even after four weeks on the road, and the crowd is spellbound by tense versions of "Exit Music" and "Karma Police", as well as a gripping "Paranoid Android".
It's a little odd, however, when "Creep" is played and Yorke, who has preened and posed his way through the song, lets the crowd sing the second verse. The song isn't a favourite of Jonny's, and when the time comes for his guttural belch of a guitar part, he rips into it with added vengeance. Yorke introduces the number - as he does most of the time - by sayinng "We play this because it's still a good song", an unnecessary apology for their biggest hit.

Sometimes I do have to justify it", he says. "Sometimes it's karaoke, and I enjoy hamming it up, but some other days it really means something to me". It is the crowd's response to the new songs that means the most to Yorke. "I've been amazed that people know the new material so well", he says. "Sometimes we play 'Creep', and halfway through we stop and say 'Sorry, that's boring'. If people don't want to hear it, you can tell".

After the show, the band piles onto the bus, eager to get to New York for the tour's finale, two days later. The bus is held up momentarily while Yorke signs autographs. "Whew, I almost didn't get out of there", he says as he sinks into the couch at the front of the bus. It's been a recurring event throughout the tour and has given Yorke a whiff of the idolatry that is simmering in America. But instead of running to the solitude of the tour bus as he might have done four years ago, Yorke has mellowed and accepted, albeit reluctantly, his public stature. "When we first came here, it was baptism by fire, and it was really freaking me out", he says. "I'm used to it now, and I have developed a leave-me-alone face".

Despite punishing fatigue, the guys are in good spirits. O'Brien and Colin attempt to roll a couple of spliffs. "Five weeks in America, and I still can't roll one", displaying something that looks more like a soggy noodle. After the joints are passed around, the band pops in a video of Kiss' infamous 1976 interview with Tom Snyder. The segment is sidesplittingly funny, with Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley playing it straight while Peter Criss and Ace Frehley are bombed out of their minds.

"What a wanker", says Yorke as Simmons talks like a cocky businessman. "I'm sure there's a lesson for us somewhere in this interview".

When the tape ends, Jonny moves to the front of the bus to watch the looming New York skyline. "Oh, my God, look at that", says the driver. He's not referring to the World Trade Center; he's pointing to a toll-booth collector who is holding cassettes of OK Computer and Pablo Honey, shaking them vigorously. "He wants autographs!" the driver says. Jonny sits frozen in amazement, staring at the zealous fan. But the bus accelerates, leaving the fan empty-handed. Jonny turns around, looks at Yorke and deadpans: "Apparently we've made it".

"Yes", Yorke agrees. "We've made it".

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Q, 1997

They are serious men with serious sales. But, cautious, paranoid and in no way the new Pink Floyd, Radiohead have their troubles, and they have a new album to promote. Still, as singer Thom Yorke tells Tom Doyle, it's not all terrible news: "murderers have stopped writing to say how much they relate to Creep..."

Brightly early most weekday mornings before 9am, when other rock stars still have at least a good six hours of kip ahead of them - or have yet in fact to go to bed following another night of drunken or chemically induced shenanigans - Radiohead's curiously angular guitarist Jonny Greenwood can usually be found in the middle of a field in the quiet Oxfordshire countryside, flying his kite. If the widescreen possibilities of this undeniably evocative scene has a touch of Pink Floyd-like imagery about it, then that perhaps is no coincidence, since the soundtrack on the rake-thin 25-year-old man's personal stereo is Meddle, an album released in 1971, the year he was born.

This evidence alone may not be enough to suggest that Radiohead are slowly mutating into the new Pink Floyd. But then there are other factors which have to be taken into consideration. Not least the fact that singer Thom Yorke warmly recalls recording parts of their self-produced third album, OK Computer, at their recently acquired studio farmhouse while, outside the window, herds of jersey cattle lumbered lazily through sunny fields. In the background, an industrial chimney belched acrid smoke into the sky. "It was the Floyd", he enthuses before - perhaps typically - feigning vomiting in self-disgust at having been forced to draw this seemingly unthinkable parallel himself. Bassist Colin Greenwood has his own thoughts about his brother's kite-flying plot to turn Radiohead into a progressive rock ensemble.

"Jonny made us all watch Pink Floyd Live in Pompeii and said, now this is how we should do videos," he offers, grinning, his already frighteningly voluminous eyes widening in mock disbelief. "I just remember seeing Dave Gilmour sitting on his arse playing guitar and Roger Waters with long greasy hair, sandals and dusty flares, staggers over and picks up this big beater and whacks this gong. Ridiculous."

Nevertheless, there is no getting away from it: Radiohead's keenly awaited third album is a sprawling, hugely experimental affair that cannot be described accurately without using the words "out" and "there". The return single, Paranoid Android, by way of an indication, is a six-and-a-half-minute epic in three movements. Jonny Greenwood admits that during the making of the record, he had found himself becoming involved in a brave, but perhaps futile side pursuit: trying to unearth half-decent prog rock albums.

"It's been very disappointing because most of it is awful," he softly admits in his engagingly posh way. "I've got it into my head that prog rock must be good because it attracted a lot of fans. So far, I've just trawled through fairly tedious Genesis albums."

Aside from all of this, there has also been the suggestions that Radiohead have been gradually morphing into R.E.M. Since the Oxford quintet's extended supporting sojourn on the Monster tour in the summer of 1995. Certainly Thom Yorke's friendship with Michael Stipe - who made the onstage pronouncement that "Radiohead are so good, they scare me" - has been well documented. In fact, Yorke and Jonny Greenwood have just returned to Oxford from London, where they were collaborating with Stipe on tracks for Velvet Goldmine, the glam rock-scrutinising film Stipe is currently producing. Notably, on OK Computer, there is evidence that Yorke's approach to lyric-writing has taken on a distinctly more oblique, Stipe-like bent.

Whatever comparisons are being made, it's clear that Radiohead have gone through something of a transitional period. It seems reasonable to declare that toying with ground-breaking studio techniques and constructing wildly ambitious musical atmospheres now figures heavily in their collective imaginations. Queen for the 90's, anyone?

"I’ve been building up my chest just now so that it looks good in a white vest," warns the small and slight-framed Yorke, with his characteristic level of sarcasm. "Christ, you should've seen the 'tache I had last week."

After coming down from such a high as Radiohead experienced when R.E.M. Took them under their wing and nursed them through the crucial period where they learned how to get their music across to stadium-proportioned crowds (Yorke claims his most deep-rooted nightmare is to become Jim Kerr at his worthiest), the band were given carte blanche to record and self-produce their next album. As a consequence, OK Computer unarguably finds them breaking into new territory, from the looped-up, all-fronts assault of Airbag, through the searingly anthemic Electioneering to the soothingly effective Exit Music (for a Film), ostensibly She's Leaving Home retold with a panicky edge.

Preliminary sessions began - in a stroke of magnificent indulgence, at actress Jane Seymour’s mansion near Bath - in the spring of last year, the very same place where the cure initially developed the commercially disastrous wild mood swings. The previous summer, Johnny Cash had rented the house before an appearance at Glastonbury. The flowing-locked English rose could be reassured that Radiohead were something less of a rock'n'roll proposition. Although they did rearrange the furniture.

"We recorded in her library," Jonny Greenwood explains. "It was wonderful going somewhere that wasn't designed for recording. Recording studios now tend to be quite scientific and clinical. You can't really impose yourself without getting over the fact that there are fag burns in the carpet and gold discs all around. It's good to go and decide that we'll turn this beautifully furnished sitting room into whatever."

While they are a five-strong band of self-confessed "neurotics anonymous", the fact that Radiohead are so keen to guard the rural location of their studio farm headquarters, where the album was completed, is indicative of their growing status as the archetypal art school-grounded English rock band afford the imperial leather- like luxury of creative freedom. This, it would seem, is a direct result of the fact that, throughout their five-year existence - while everyone's heads were turned in the directions of initially Blur, then Suede and now Oasis - Radiohead have quietly grown into a formidably successful act. Their second album, The Bends, has now achieved platinum status in Britain, a trend more or less followed in most record-buying nations.

When, at the beginning of 1996, Parlophone records released street spirit (fade out), the fourth, campaign-closing single from the bends, its hypnotically languid tone rendered it too dark and sombre to be playlisted on Radio One. It still debuted with a one-fingered salute at number 5. On the release of War Child's Help album the previous September, Radiohead’s magnificently moody contribution, Lucky (oddly included on OK Computer), proved the stand-out - although the band had been forced to complete the track in an intensive five-hour period to meet the required deadline, after a day spent posing for a War Child camera crew dispatched to film them pretending to record.

"They were waiting for us to record the song, and we were waiting for them to go," smiles the unnaturally lofty Ed O'Brien, credited on the group's record sleeves for supplying "polite guitar", as opposed to Jonny Greenwood's "abusive guitar". Of the video footage depicting casualties of the Bosnian conflict that was subsequently set to the track, Yorke - never one to understate his emotional reactions - simply says, "it had me in tears".

Today the five members of Radiohead, fresh from tramping through fields of rape for their Q photo session, mill around the management offices close to their recording studio, seemingly a relaxed and quietly polite bunch who enjoy a laugh of the wry and knowing variety. O'Brien, lightly stoned this afternoon, since this is effectively a day off for the band - although pockets of them will frequently disappear into an adjoining recording room to continue work on b-sides - is charming and affable and has earned a reputation as the band member renowned for his on-stage acts of over-exuberance. The band gleefully recall the guitarist once disappearing over the lip of the stage at a theatre gig in North Carolina, tumbling into the orchestra pit and then struggling for ages to clamber back out.

Groomed drummer and, impressively, ex-Samaritan Phil Selway proves suitably genial for someone who has had a Japanese fan club - Phil Is Great - set up in his honour. Another of the Phil Is Great club's occasional meetings is planned for the following week, when Radiohead make a promotional trip to the Pacific Rim.

The Greenwood brothers, who share no distinctive physical resemblance, are polar opposites. Jonny rarely touches alcohol; Colin can regularly be located in a pub after frenzied searches five minutes before the band are due on stage. Jonny is silent unless coaxed; Colin is effusive when engaged on the topic of books, records, other bands. Jonny was likely described as "a dreamer" by his teachers, his head seemingly operating at some cloud-high altitude; Colin is sharp and wary and likely the cornerstone of Radiohead. When together, both share an inscrutable look if questioned on virtually any subject. Colin admits to feeling guilty of acting a touch cruelly to his colour-blind younger brother when they were growing up: he would mix up the crayons, which the guitarist claims "retarded me".

"We share the same gene pool," states the elder, directing another meaningful look towards his sibling.

"But I got the shallow end," adds his toothily blessed younger brother, without any detectable hesitation.

Meanwhile, the boyishly proportioned Thom Yorke pads around barefoot in blue canvas jeans, Radiohead fan club t-shirt and Gaultier shades, his short spiky hair dyed black after extended periods as peroxide blond and retina-damaging orange. Quietly intense, he is a man possessed of a bitingly sharp sense of humour, although an air of brow-beaten cynicism can be detected in his every utterance.

The others simply describe Yorke as "a bit of a worrier", but it would seem that his enduring reputation as a troubled and overly angsty individual is reasonably well-deserved, despite his claims to having recently "learned to relax a little". He talks with his head bowed and eyes closed, covering his face with his hands and peering through his fingers, sometimes curling his limbs up into a tight ball, as if he is under physical attack. The prospect of Radiohead performing this summer to 40,000 people in Ireland as well as headlining a major festival (interestingly, on the same weekend as the strategically unannounced Glastonbury bill) seems to fill him with dread.

"I can't see why we're doing these big gigs," he shrugs. "thing is, whoever it is up there, it's not the person sitting here. It's a completely different state of mind, that you have to spend a long time getting into. I can't switch it on and off. When even the logistics of these big gigs are discussed, I just fucking freeze up. It's not something I'm emotionally capable of dealing with yet. Hopefully I'll get back into a different frame of mind where it won't worry me."

While there is a certain fragile quality to Yorke, the two sides to Radiohead's chief songwriter are exemplified in those moments when his distinctive singing voice swoops down from a choirboy falsetto to a low, anguished snarl. Similarly, in conversation he can suddenly cop an attitude, turning shirty and argumentative. O’Brien remembers his first impression of the young Yorke when the two were involved in a play - the former acting, the latter providing musical accompaniment - at the Oxford school where Radiohead first met as teenagers.

"There was this tense dress rehearsal," O’Brien remembers, "and Thom and this other fella were jamming freeform cod jazz throughout it. The director stopped the play and shouted up to this scaffold tower thing they were playing on, trying to find out what the hell was going on. Thom started shouting down, I don't know what the fuck we're supposed to be playing. And this was to a teacher."

Born with one eye closed on October 7, 1968, the infant Thom Yorke had already endured five major operations on his paralysed eyelid by the time he was six. Made to wear an eye-patch during his early school years, he was cruelly mocked by his schoolmates. He half-bitterly brushes off suggestions that this may have caused him to have a slight chip on his shoulder.

"Oh no," he states sharply. "I was sweet and lovely and nothing ever happened to me. (Cagily) when I was younger, I was in the music room most of the time, anyway. It was great. No-one came down and there were these tiny rooms with sound-proofed cubicles. I suppose I’m quite an aggressive person. I was a fighter at school, but I never won. I was into the idea of fighting (laughs hysterically). I've had to calm down a bit, otherwise I’d go nuts."

Yorke recalls the moment in his younger life when he realised that he was perhaps not quite as handy with his fists as he'd imagined.

"In first year at college, I went through this phase where I was into this granddad hat and coat I had," he quietly explains. "They were immaculate and I was into dressing like an old man. But I went out one night and there was these three blokes, townie guys, waiting to beat someone up and they found me. They said something, I turned around, blew them a kiss and that was it. They beat the living shit out of me. One was kicking me, one had a stick and the other was smashing me in the face. That put me off fighting a bit."

Back in mid-'80s Oxford, where Radiohead first bonded and began rehearsing, essentially as the school band, they called themselves On A Friday. Selway was in the sixth form, O’Brien in the fifth year, Yorke and Colin Greenwood in the fourth and Jonny Greenwood - the last to join - in the third.

"We’re still in our same classes and years really," the elder Greenwood grimly decides. "The thing about having been together for such a long period is that there are some heinously embarrassing group shots from ten years ago when were in adolescence with varying styles of haircut and demeanour which would now be openly laughed at in the street."

During this era, of course, the quiff was king ("you'd literally take a photograph of Morrissey to the barber and say, I want it like that") and if On A Friday resembled The Smiths visually, they had yet to find a foothold musically. The four others remember tapes of Thom Yorke's early compositions as being "schizophrenic".

"One track, Rattlesnake, just had a drum loop that Thom did himself at home on a tape recorder with bad scratching over the top and kind of Prince vocals," Jonny Greenwood remembers. "The Chains had viola and was meant to sound like The Waterboys. What is that you see was a feedback frenzy. After hearing it, I knew Thom was writing great songs and I knew what I wanted to do."

Nevertheless, the younger Greenwood's ambitions were thwarted by the group's reluctance to let him join. Described by them as "a precocious talent" who would whip through an assortment of instruments in an attempt to impress his potential band mates, On A Friday's first gig at Oxford Jericho Tavern in 1987 featured (according to Selway) Jonny sitting on stage "with a harmonica, waiting for his big moment".

As imageless as a police identity parade, and embodying such extremes of stature and build that Ed O’Brien probably towers a whole foot above Thom Yorke, Radiohead initially found it difficult to attract attention during the lifespan of their debut album, 1993's Pablo Honey, when other, more fashion-conscious outfits were hogging the limelight.

On its initial release in the UK, the second, self-hating single, the possibly classic Creep, stiffed. As with The Fixx before them and bush afterwards, Radiohead suffered the indignity of being rejected by their motherland and embraced by America when Creep became a slacker anthem after an extended period of over-exposure on college radio. By the time Radiohead arrived in America for their first tour, Creep was already in the Billboard Top 40, and for the summer of 1993 its mutant guitar crunch and soaring melody spilled out from car radios and apartment windows all over America.

Its follow-up, the bracing Stop Whispering, failed to maintain the momentum and the band found themselves performing to capacity audiences interested in hearing one song. For a time, Yorke re-christened the song Crap.

"At that time the whole so-called alternative rock thing had happened there," remembers Yorke, "populated by sap programmers from the 80's who didn't have a clue what they were putting on and Creep suffered from that. It was a good song, but afterwards it was, well, let's have more that please because the programmers understand it, and it's like, no, sorry."

"We didn't know what was normal in America," Jonny Greenwood muses. "We went over there and we'd turn on MTV and Creep would be on again. We though, oh, that's good."

"People were being very nice to us over there because Creep was doing well," adds Selway. "Stop Whispering didn't do quite so well, so that opened us up to the more cynical side of it."

"We were hysterical," decides O’Brien. "One moment we'd be giggling, the next we'd be really down. Our reactions were extreme."

Regretfully, it was around this time that Radiohead, under pressure to visually re-invent themselves, became the tightly trousered, big-haired rock band they felt America had expected of them. Jonny Greenwood and Yorke even accepted modelling assignments for American fashion magazines, the latter sporting a hellish tangle of hair extensions atop his cranium.

"I was rock," winces the frontman with an embarrassed laugh. "There were so many elements to that period, but the hair was the worst. It was such a weird trip anyway, because suddenly we were seen as this big investment and there was money being thrown at us. It didn't last long enough to mess us up, but then I suppose, for a while, it probably did."

The most positive knock-on effect of Creep's US success was that on its re-release in the UK it reached number 7. On the negative side, Radiohead were in danger of looking like a one-trick pony. Immediately they set to work on The Bends, titled after the dramatic side-effects of emerging from the depths too rapidly. Cutting between zooropa-fashioned loop collages (Planet Telex), folk rock (Fake Plastic Trees) and hushed atmospherics (Bulletproof), the record managed to distract the listener for long enough to forget that Creep existed. Of course, America couldn't get its head around it.

"There’s this assumption, especially over here, that Radiohead are big in America", O’Brien offers. "Radiohead are not big in America. We had Fake Plastic Trees as a single and it was played to a radio station. They did a survey of their listeners - 18-to-25-year-old males who drive four-wheel-drive jeeps - and it came bottom of the list. The thing with Radiohead and America is that we had one pop hit there."

"And they don't remember it anyway because they've got the attention span of insects," Yorke mutters, darkly. "Our so-called success in America was that it allowed us to do lots of things, but it also meant that somehow we owed somebody something. But I couldn't work out who and I couldn't work out how much."

Flying in the face of the drug-hoovering, groupie-rogerering rock band image, Radiohead present themselves as Evian-sipping abstainers, content to play a hand of bridge on their tour bus, thanking you very much. Nevertheless, the punishing 18-month touring schedule that followed the bends was not without casualties.

There is an undercurrent of obsessiveness within the group, a matter most evident when they play live. Jonny Greenwood plays his guitar with such teeth-grindingly frantic force that he unknowingly lacerates his fingers. Recently, he has taken to strapping on an arm brace, which could be seen as a unique guitar-hero affectation. However, Greenwood insists he's been ordered to wear it since it was diagnosed that his playing style was causing repetitive strain injury. Similarly, he is keen to point out that the bulky headphones he sported through the latter half of the bends tour are industrial ear shields he was advised to wear after suffering from a dangerously leaky lughole.

"My ear was ringing and bleeding for two weeks on an American tour," he reveals, with strangely calm detachment. "There was this terrifying gig in Cleveland, where I was nearly fainting. I was taken to the hospital at three in the morning and the doctor said the situation was really grim. I'd love to do without both of them, but the arm brace I’m still going to need.

"It's conceited to deny there's any affectation but having said that, I enjoy putting the arm brace on before I play. It's like taping up your fingers before a boxing match. It's a ritual."

The most memorably grim incident of the tour, however, occurred in Munich, when Yorke blacked out and collapsed onstage.

"That had been building up," he mumbles while wriggling uncomfortably in his seat, head in hands. "There's been an incident in America where I’d been really sick as fuck. This cold had got to my throat and whacked me out. It turned into laryngitis. The promoter takes you to the doctor, that's the normal standard thing, and the doctor says, oh no, you're fine to play. You argue with them. They say, no, take these drugs and you'll be fine. Then you realise the promoter is paying the doctor.

"It got bad again in Germany because we were sleeping on a cold damp tour bus in the middle of winter. This doctor turns up - usual thing, paid by the promoter - with this huge bag of drugs. All sorts of shit, man. He offered to inject me with steroids, which I refused. I didn't take anything because I thought I could get through it. We did the soundcheck and I was like, oh shit, this is really bad. My voice was not there at all. By that point, it's too late, you can't cancel. I go on and third song in, I lost it. I remember hitting the floor and then I wasn't there."

He pauses and his face contorts into a perverse smile.

"It was great, actually."

Most things about Thom Yorke’s burgeoning rock star status seem to trouble him deeply. The word he uses most frequently is "doomed". While he claims not to suffer from an acute fear of fame ("it's just that I have no respect for it"), he admits that his growing friendship with Michael Stipe has involved the R.E.M. singer offering guidance on how Yorke should deal with his concerns, although the Radiohead frontman is protective of their relationship.

"If you don't have any semblance of a normal life, then you won't be able to write," he muses, "and if you can't write, then you won't be there. He's helped me to deal with most things I couldn't deal with. The rest is not anyone else's business and that's what's great about it. Anyway. Whatever. It sounds like I’ve been touched by an evangelist or something."

Why still bother to make music then?

"Because I can be very drunk in a club in Oxford on a Monday night and some guy comes up to you and buys you a drink and says that the last record you made changed his life. That means something. It makes you chill about it."

As a result of the anguished nature of your lyrics, are Radiohead fans fairly obsessive individuals as a whole?

"They were. In the letters they can be, yeah. But when you meet people it's a different thing. People put pen to paper for different reasons, some of them quite weird. It was set up like that from the first record because of Creep and all the hyperbole around that, but actually we lost most of that debris when we brought out the bends. Murderers have stopped writing to me to say how much they can relate to Creep, so that's cool. Now it's just people who're into what we're doing and there's a respect on both sides."

So your motivation is purely and simply the music you make and the reaction that you'll get from it?

"(Sarcastically) I know it sounds awful, but yes. (Changes mood) but, y'know, that's probably lies as well..."

You do seem to eat yourself up about everything.

"I’m not eating myself up," he continues, defensively. "It's just that if I read that last statement, I would think, wanker. Because whoever's said it isn't being honest."

There was a certain point at which Nirvana had to pull back because they felt they were getting too big and they couldn't handle it. Can you see yourself doing the same if you get really famous?

"Yeah, I've got the pull-back button ready. You have to have. That hotline back to the president."

How would you do that? Release a few 17-minute singles?

"No... No there's other ways to do it. There's other shadows you can find. You can still be there. That was the thing I’ve had to learn recently. But it still gets to me."

Do you ever fear for the ill-effects of increased success on your mental health?

"Oh, yes," he exclaims, his mood strangely and suddenly lifting. "Thank you, yes."

Later that afternoon, as the light begins to fail, Thom Yorke appears to have returned to a more balanced state and almost rhetorically enquires, "I don't think this has been about moaning, do you?" pulling an "urgh" face when his band mates invite him down to the beer garden of a local pub for some light tea-time refreshment, he wanders off instead in the direction of the studio to continue work on the b-sides for Paranoid Android.

As the others wend their way through the winding country lanes on the way to the hostelry, the talk turns to the fact that their frontman seems to be bearing so much intolerable weight on his shoulders.

"It's weird to see the public representation of Thom," ventures Jonny Greenwood after a time, "because it's quite different. I find Thom to be very affectionate and child-like."

"Yeah," his brother adds, "but we don't draw the curtains of our bedrooms at night when we're going to sleep and see all these people staring up at the window. We don't have to deal with that. It's different graduations of stress, I suppose. What's important to him is, if he can have two different personas, it's a way of protecting himself."

"Well, I shared a room with him for four years," Selway laughs, before tellingly adding, "and that's not the man in the interviews."

Deeply weird bunch, Radiohead. Insular, posh, irrationally paranoid, yet capable of creating achingly beautiful songs resplendent with mind-warping sonic tricks. They might just have the potential to rechisel the granite face of rock music, if their new-found prog edge doesn't devour them or they don't disintegrate in the process. God help them if they ever get into proper drugs.

"Us on hard drugs? That would be horrible," Thom Yorke had stated earlier, in a lighter mood. "We'd probably end up sounding like Bryan Adams."

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Spin Magazine, 07.07.1996

HARMONY IN MY HEAD

Harmony in Radiohead's The Bends reveals a band whose musical flights go far beyond "Creep" - and, as J.D. Considine discovers, rely on none of the usual Britpop poses.


Oxford University may be celebrated for its grassy quads, ancient architecture, and lush, well-ordered gardens, but what a visitor experiences is mostly walls, some of them elegant and artful, some menacingly medieval. Gates are few and far between, and are inevitably graced with a sign announcing that thus-and-such college is closed to visitors.

"Have you read Jude the Obscure?" asks Radiohead singer Thom Yorke. He's drinking coffee in the very proper lounge of Oxford's very proper Forte Grande Randolph Hotel, looking for all the world like Martin Short doing Johnny Rotten. "The whole book is about Jude trying to get into the university, and then not being able to do it. and in the end driving himself crazy."

"You know, for one very pretentious moment, we nearly called the band 'Jude,' among many other hundreds of names," says Jonny Greenwood, who with his gangly limbs, rucksack, and anorak, looks like a student rather than the band's lead guitarist and keyboard whiz.

"The other one was 'Music,' " adds Yorke with a cackle. "Phew, eh?"

Phew, indeed. Yet as wincingly precious as those names are, they do speak to two important points: first, that the members of Radiohead, like Jude, are perennial outsiders, never quite gaining entry to the hallowed halls of Britpop; and second, that music really is the most important thing the band has to offer. Because as every other band in Britain was out last year flogging its image, agenda, look or theory, Radiohead merely delivered an album of exceptional power and beauty called The Bends.

Packed with soaring melodies and dramatic bursts of instrumental color, it fitted no particular trend, instead wrapping each song in just the right combination of guitar crunch, keyboard hush, and rhythm-section push. Not the most obvious way to make music, but give it time and you're soon smitten. Just ask the British music press, which ranked The Bends right up with the far more fashionable work of Blur, Elastica, and Oasis. not bad for a band that refuses to trade Oxford for London. Initially part of the Thames Valley movement--a loose confederation of Oxford-area bands such as Ride, Slowdive, and Chapterhouse, whose specialty was a swirling, guitar-heavy sound and a total lack of stage presence--Radiohead made the leap from local to international in 1993 with the release of Pablo Honey, an album mainly known for giving the world "Creep."

A classic of the miserable-male genre, what put "Creep" over wasn't Yorke's well-phrased self-deprecation but the way Greenwood's hyperdistorted guitar bludgeoned the chorus into submission. No matter how many times you hear it, there's something about the car-trying-to-start hesitation of that power chord that leaves even well-adjusted listeners raving like Beavis and Butt-head. "Beavis nearly comes, doesn't he?" laughs Greenwood, recalling the "Creep" segment of Beavis and Butt-head.

"Creep" became so big, in fact, that it threatened to dwarf the band. Did they ever consider refusing to play the tune?

"Well, we had this chat with Michael Stipe," says bassist Colin Greenwood. Radiohead was opening for R.E.M., and R.E.M. had gone through a similar problem with "Losing My Religion." "Stipe always gives this little speech before they start to do the song, saying 'This isn't our song anymore. This is your song.' The fact that we were still doing 'Creep,' he thought, was really cool."

That's not to say the band wasn't tempted to ditch their "Creep." "The Beach Party," snorts Yorke. "We swore that would be the last time we'd do that fucking thing. An MTV beach party. Standing by a pool, because the sun didn't come out."

"At least we played well," offers Jonny Greenwood. "But I don't think the irony was lost on people. All these gorgeous, bikini-ed girls shaking their mammary glands, and we're playing 'Creep' and looking terrible."

"In the rain," adds Yorke.

It didn't help that the members of Radiohead hardly come across as party animals. As a group, they seem happy to converse quietly or sit nose-in-book while the world goes on around them. This has made rock stardom a shock. "A couple girls turned up yesterday, asking if this was the street where the guy from Radiohead lived," recounts Colin Greenwood with an ironic chuckle. "Having a stalker is such a '90s thing."

The success of The Bends has kept radiohead from being known only as the Creep band. Getting there wasn't easy. When radiohead began work on their second album, in February 1994, the British music press was once again arguing that what england needed most was bands with an easily pigeonholed attitude. So as Oasis, Blur, and others rose to the challenge, Yorke began to worry. "I was completely paranoid," he says. "Blur decided to be mods, so we had to decide to be something else. But I couldn't work out what it was. All of the things we like and were thinking of modeling ourselves on are fairly image-free."

"I remember when we first signed, someone said, 'what agenda do you have?' " says guitarist Ed O'Brien. "with British bands, there was this whole thing about having something to say. but, maybe naively, we said, 'it's about music.' and that's what it's about."

Radiohead's sound set the bends apart from everything else the British rock scene produced last year. Lush with aural detail and arresting arrangements, the album never settles into a specific genre, making it easy to get lost in the depth and drama of the songs. And while other Britpoppers lyrically opt for the cutting or clever, what Yorke goes for is resonance. It can be as simple as the artificiality implicit in the title "Fake Plastic Trees," or as deeply layered as the way "My Iron Lung" becomes a metaphor for a relationship as confining as it is sustaining.

But musical and verbal atmospherics often don't translate easily to MTV. Unlike "creep," the bends took a long while to climb the charts. "It's taken people a year to figure [the album] out, and now they're going 'fucking 'ell!' " gloats Yorke. Ironically, the idea for the Pulp Fictionish buzz clip breakout hit "High and Dry," came entirely from director Paul Cunningham. "I like the idea of it being someone else's song completely," says the singer. Otherwise, Radiohead's experience with video has been less than positive. "There was that American video woman," recalls Jonny Greenwood, as Yorke rolls his eyes. "She came over with us on a video shoot and said, 'Can't you make the little chap jump up and down a bit?'

"That kind of says it all."

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RAW, 13.01 - 13.02.96

Life on Planet Radiohead
by Clark Collis


"This is it. I'm sure this is the way. Just around the corner and... Oh bugger." We're backstage at the Southampton Guildhall late in the evening of November 7th last year, and Radiohead bass player Colin Greenwood is having what he admits is "a very Spinal Tap moment". Somewhere in the building's cavernous basement a party is taking place to celebrate the successful conclusion of Radiohead's latest UK tour. There will be alcohol. There will be celebrities (well, Roger Taylor from Queen anyway). Now all Colin has to do is find the damn place... The night has been going so well up to this point too. Some light dinner followed a quick spell on the information highway via one of the band's several laptop computers. Then there was the gig itself. A capacity crowd crawling the walls as Radiohead ploughed through material both old and new. They've always been tight but the last year on the road has seen them climb new heights with 'Creep', 'Fake Plastic Trees' and a weird, pounding 'Planet Telex' all melding together perfectly into a set now stretching out towards the two-hour mark. By the time they encored with a slyly operatic version of Bond theme 'Nobody Does It Better' the capacity crowd were almost too knackered to yell the place down, demanding more. Almost. That was then, however, and this is now. And now involves facing a sturdy but decidedly un-party-like fire-door at the end of yet another indistinguishable corridor. Colin thinks this could be it. He's pretty definite. The portal to Party Central. Booze Bonanza. The bassist pushes down the door's thick metal bar. "You know, people are always saying that we're like U2," says Colin as we gaze out at a vista that even the most extravagant of estate agents would have to describe as 'some old car park'. "But I'm sure this never fucking happens to Adam Clayton".

It's around 1981 and it takes the adolescent Thom Yorke about five seconds to realize that his new school is not going to be much fun. It's very big on (a) preparing you for a career in accountancy, (b) rowing and (c) kicking the shit out of anyone who objects to (a) or (b). Go figure. This is the last think that Thom needs. Not that life has exactly been peaches'n'cream up to this point anyway. Thom was born with a paralyzed left eye which, at first, the doctors thought would be a permanent condition. Then one day a specialist suggested that maybe a muscle graft might sort things out. The result was that Thom had five major operations before he was six years old. His vision improved but Thom had to wear a patch for a year. And now all this. An all-boys school just outside Oxford. At least Thom has a dream that doesn't involve chartered accountancy. On his eighth birthday he gets a Spanish guitar. From that point on Thom knows what he wants. He wants to be a pop star. So what if all he can play is 'Kumbaya'? He can learn. All he needs is the right people to help. Colin Greenwood is in the same year as Thom and, if anything, looks even thinner and sicker. They go to the same parties. Thom in heavy-duty mascara. Colin in a full, black bodystocking. They don't go to pick up the girls or get hammered. They go to take over the stereo system. Play a little Joy Division. A little Magazine. See how people liked them apples. One day Thom discovers that Colin can play the bass. That's two. Ed O'Brien is a different kettle of fish altogether. Enormously tall Ed actually looks a bit like Morrissey - if you squint - but he does play the guitar. That's three. All they need now is a drummer. The only suitable candidate, a guy called Phil Selway, is a couple of years older than them. And when you're at school, a couple of years is everything. In fact, it's some of Phil's contemporaries who are throwing Colin and Thom downstairs to see if they bounce. Still, Phil seems like a nice guy. It's worth a shot... And suddenly there are four. Well, five actually. Colin's younger brother, Jonny, is some sort of shit hot viola player. Unfortunately, there isn't much room for a viola in Oxford's newest post-punk pop band. Still, Jonny is very keen, and is told he can play harmonica. They rehearse every Friday. In fact that's how they get their first name. On A Friday. OK, so it's not great. But no one can think of anything better. Predictably, few of their parents are keen. Thom has to say that he's staying at a friends house when they start doing gigs. One day, the headmaster bans all electronic music from school. Bugger him. Bugger them all!

Then... school's out! Leaving Jonny behind they all go off to college in the autumn of 1987. Thom shoots off to Exeter University to do Fine Art and Literature. He starts to mess around with samplers and plays with local techno outfit Flickernoise. Phil and Ed are at Liverpool. Phil plays drums with a theatre production of Return To The Forbidden Planet. But he's thinking about packing the sticks away. Maybe getting a job in publishing. Colin has become Entertainment Officer at Peterhouse College in Cambridge. It isn't so bad. He plays in a few bands. In his final year he's put in charge of booking bands for the Peterhouse Ball. He books Humphrey Littleton. He books the James Taylor Quartet. He books himself three times. Somehow the band continues to rehearse during the holidays. They play some gigs. The Jericho Tavern in Oxford. London's Rock Garden. No one knows who the hell they are but it's still cool. Jonny switches from harmonica to guitar. In a couple of months he's caught up with Thom and Ed. By the time everyone has left college he's in a different league altogether.

1991. Time to get serious. They change their name to Radiohead and move into a house together in Oxford. It should be like The Monkees. It soon turns into the Adams family. They tear the wallpaper off hauling the Hammond organ in and out. The ashtrays overflow with fag butts. And every time you walk downstairs the carpet comes with you. Worse still, they find stuff that obviously belonged to the previous tenant. Ed finds a half-eaten pork pie. The teeth marks are still visible. Soon only Colin and Thom are left. They all try and get jobs. Phil already has his publishing thing sorted out. Ed starts working as a barman. Colin signs on at Our Price. Thom just stays at home playing ear-shattering techno music to anyone who will listen. There are few takers. They carry on practising. And gigging. And sending off demos. It's starting to sound good. Those three guitars hammering together like nobody's business. Thom's becoming a good frontman too. Not showy. Just there. Intense. Possessed. There.

It's mid-'91. One day the band get a call from Chris Hufford and Bryce Edge. Formerly members of new romantic never-quite-weres Aeriel FX, the pair have set up a management company and are looking for a band to cut their teeth on. They think Radiohead could be it. The band agree to let them have a go and, within months, a feeding frenzy starts among the record companies. In the end the band agree to sign with Parlophone at the end of 1991. Colin and Jonny's mum refuses to tell their grandad on the grounds that the shock would kill him. On the day they actually sign on the dotted line Radiohead travel down to London. Someone suggests that they go out for a drink afterwards. The band decline. The band hit the road in earnest. They support everyone who's no one. Kingmaker. The Sultans Of Ping. Spiritualized. Doctor And The Medics. In May 1992 they release the Drill EP. IT receives little radio play and only charts at 101. But still, these are the early days. And it feels good to actually see it in their hands. Their names. Their photograph. Their music. Anyway, the band have an ace up their sleeves. Incredibly, it came about by accident. Not the actual song. Not the way Thom sings 'You're special(sic)/You're so fucking special'. But those howling arhythmic word-of-God chords that cut in just before the chorus. They were accidental. Christ, Jonny didn't even know the tape was running. Anyway, the result is phenomenal and they know it. In interviews, Tom (sic) even says as much. ("That song will always be there. And in five, six, ten years time people will be saying that is a classic record.") This is the one. 'Creep' is it. 'Creep' is released in September '92. It reaches 72 in the charts.

October 1992. IT takes about 90 seconds for Jonny Greenwood to go from standing onstage to sitting in the front of the tour bus. As the guitarist clambers into the front seat and picks up his newspaper he can still just about hear the audience clamouring for more. Tonight was a great show. One of the best they've played. Great crowd reaction too. When Thom hit that chorus in 'Vegetable' ('I'm not a vegetaaable!') they went completely bananas. Then again, this is only The Fleece And Firkin in Bristol. Three hundred people tops. The band has been signed for over a year now and things are moving very slowly. Worse still, the press seems to have turned on them. Apparently Radiohead are a 'corporate' band. And a miserable git corporate band to boot. Jonny gave up his poly course to do this. The others have already got their degrees. But if Radiohead doesn't make it where does that leave him? No, a good gig. But there are still... concerns. The band record their debut album, Pablo Honey, in just three weeks. It sounds good. Maybe not perfect. But definitely good. Eventually, the band creep into the Top 40 with 'Anyone Can Play Guitar'. It makes the press think twice about writing them off. But, even so, it all seems so low-key. This definitely isn't the way Thom thought it would happen. Bizarrely, the news that will change the lives of Radiohead comes from Israel. Some DJ starts playing 'Creep'. Then another. Then another. 'Creep' enters the Israeli Top Ten. Radiohead are suddenly very big out there. It seems strange. How can they understand while England can't? Anyway, everyone is big somewhere. Jesus, there are probably remote parts of the Andes where Bros are still worshipped like gods. But then it starts happening everywhere. New Zealand. Scandinavia. Spain. Finally the big one. America. MTV has put 'Creep' on heavy rotation and the radio is playing it non-stop. Thom is shown a map which demonstrates the way 'Creep' is sweeping America. It reminds him of the attacking German armies at the start of Dad's Army. The band hit the road. They're ready for this. They've had ten years of practice. No more toilets though. They're now playing halls so big they virtually have their own gravitational pull. They play the Arsenio Hall show which they're told is a really big deal. They turn up at K-ROQ radio station and answer people's phone-in sex queries. Back in England 'Creep' is re-released. Suddenly, all the papers that had written them off as no-marks suddenly want interviews. Thom attempts to choke back his disgust. Sometimes he even succeeds. Radiohead return to the States. And Canada. And everywhere. Things start to get surreal. Pablo Honey ships half a million copies in America. Thom does an advert for jeans. When German journalists ask Colin and Thom whether they ever write anything together the pair start babbling about an imaginary composition entitled 'Your Wind In My Hair'. The journalists solemnly write it all down. The band are presented with gold discs in New York. They're taken away and re-presented in Los Angeles.

No one really knows when they start to lose it. But lose it they do. Somewhere aong the line it all becomes too much. Receptionists ask Thom, "Are you that 'Creep' guy?" The band start getting weird mail. One is from a convicted murderer who says he identifies with Thom. He writes back to people saying he's not a counsellor. Still the mail pours in. In the autumn of '93 they are forced to cancel an appearance at the Reading Festival due to a problem with Thom's voice. A Harley Street specialist says that his neck feels like concrete. And still the gigs roll on. In an attempt to alleviate the boredom they start to video everything. The people they meet. Themselves. Anything. Sometimes Thom is so pissed that he just ends up pointing the camera at the carpet. There are still high points - some American gigs with Belly, meeting R.E.M.'s Mike Mills and Bill Berry when they play the 40 Watt club in Athens, Georgia - but things just begin to fall apart. Even the constant demands from German journalists to hear 'Your Wind In My Hair' aren't funny anymore and soon the band disappear off intto their own little worlds and enter what Thom describes as "complete fucking meltdown". Jonny listens to talking books incessantly. Colin begins hanging out with the roadcrew. And Thom just stops communicating. Wondering how it came to this. They were friends, after all. Mates. And now all he wants to do is shut it all down. Pack his bags and get the hell out of there. At last it's over and the band return to England. Which is when things start getting really bad. For their second album the band will record in London at RAK Studios and eventually move to the famous Abbey Road to complete work. They've chosen John Leckie as their producer because he's the guy who made Magazine's Real Life. Leckie is one of the best but, having just come from watching The Stone Roses piss about for three years, he's in no hurry to nursemaid another band through that difficult second album. Things don't go well. The songs just aren't there. One of them sounds just like Guns N' Roses for God's sake. To make matters worse Thom becomes convinced that the rest of the band aren't trying. Eventually, the sessions are abandoned after Leckie tells them to do what the hell they like. But stop doing this. By this stage things have gotten so bad that even Hufford and Edge are worried enough to start looking around for another band to manage. They find one called Supergrass. And all the time the pressure is mounting. From the record company. From the fans. The message is clear. Go on. You can do it. Give us another 'Creep'.

September 1994. Ed O'Brien is in his parents' living room flipping through the band's library or home-made videos. An immensely amenable character, the guitarist dishes out cups of tea while giving a running commentary on tapes. They turn out to be a pretty mixed bag. The stuff from a year ago shows a bunch of people who look like they'd rather hammer nails in their own eyes than crack a smile. The more recent footage, though, is cheerier. There's Thom and Jonny getting steamed in a Japanese sake bar. And there's Colin shoving a Cornetto into his face at Bali airport. And there's Ed... um... staggering around in his hotel room ("I was very pissed. I think I may have been trying to simulate the Can-Can in front of some mirrors."). After a couple of hours Ed's dad returns from work and the guitarist scurries around tidying up. Suddenly, he wheels around. "This may sound a bit strange," he says piling up the video tapes behind the TV. "But don't get him talking about music." Fine, you think. Two hours of Max Bygraves reminiscences you can do without. Mr O'Brien Snr turns out to be as friendly as his offspring. A highly-regarded osteopath, he is clearly chuffed with the band's success and really seems to know his stuff. Actually, it turns out he really, really knows his stuff. "Who's that?" Ed's dad demands, peering at the TV set which is now showing a video of two women leaning against an enormous silver-grey tour bus. It was shot in October of 1993. Umm... Tanya Donnelly and Gail Greenwood. They're in a band called Belly. Ed buries his head in his hands. "Ah yes... Tanya. I do think the Throwing Muses are better off without her. Have you heard Kristen Hersh's acoustic album? It's absolutely fantastic..."

Ironically, what saves Radiohead is another tour. That desire not to let a decade of blood, sweat and friendship just disappear down the toilet. In fact, they had tried to sort things out at the end of '93. It was the first date of a European jaunt with James. Things were bad. Very bad. An emergency band meeting was called right after the band hit Hamburg. Drink was consumed. Souls bared. But it didn't change anything. The recording sessions proved that. In the sprinkg of '94 they head off to play a few dates in Mexico. The band have hit a total low and this is the last thing they need. Carrering around shitty Central American roads. Playing to people who, if they've heard of them at all, only know the song that is rapidly becoming the other C-word. They are, in short, people with absolutely nothing to lose. And it feels strangely good. The shows go well. More importantly, the band start talking again. Kidding around. Slowly remembering quite why they got into this stupid, corrupt kiss-ass business in the first place. By the time they return to England everything is just about alright again It's the songs that clinch it. Songs like the tortured anti-beauty lament 'High & Dry'. Or 'Black Star'. Or 'Bones'. They work quickly too. 'My Iron Lung' is recorded at a soundcheck at The Astoria. The pounding, almost Zeppelin-esque 'Planet Xerox' (sic) comes together after a drunken restaurant outing. (Thom will later admit that the lyrics are "total gibberish".). It feels good. By the time 'My Iron Lung' is refused A-listing by Radio One in September of '94 on the grounds of raucousness they can even see the funny side. What do they have to do to get playlisted? Record a charity record?

In March 1995 Radiohead finally release their second album, The Bends. An instant, joyous classic of scorched eath angst and wall-of-guitar attack, the record receives almost unanimously good reviews. The second single, a double A of 'High & Dry' and 'Planet Telex' (renamed after a quick chat with the Xerox lawyers) even features some dance remixes a good 10 years after Thom first started banging on about BPMs. OK, so there's the odd jibe about Radiohead becoming the next U2 - great. Either they're "all over" or they're "too big", but Thom takes it in his stride and starts muttering about his accountants urging a move to Dublin. Once again the band head out on a world tour. The venues in America may be smaller but the crowds seem to be getting into the new stuff and at least they're not at each other's throats anymore. The band start having fun with interviewers again. Colin starts telling people how he intends to set up a fellowship of rock'n'roll at Peterhouse with an entrance exam that would include sections on joint-rolling and how to deal with groupies. Things start getting fun during the summer when the band start supporting R.E.M.. Radiohead are big R.E.M. fans. At first, things are weird though. After all, what are you supposed to say to Michael Stipe? Soon everyone chills out. After the second date in Berlin both bands get plastered at a record company surrounded by inflatable balloons. The next day, Mike Mills shows Thom a letter that Bill Clinton has sent him sympathising over the bass-player's recent stomach troubles. Bizzare. By the time they start the American leg, Radiohead have started to teach R.E.M. the basics of cricket. Even the bad things seem alright. The new single 'Fake Plastic Trees' is derided as 'angst rock' in the movie Clueless. But it's then played incessantly on the soundtrack (but not on Radio One). They tour with Soul Asylum who turn out to be nice guys even though their music sucks. At a gig in Canada they have all their equipment nicked. Two years ago this would have just about finished them off but now it's just a blip. In fact Thom rather enjoys it. For one day everyone feels so sorry for them and everything is free. On September 4 they record 'Lucky' for the Bosnia-aid 'Help' album. Even given the do-it-in-a-day time restrictions it's relatively easy. Everyone feels very emotional. By the time Jonny overdubs a choir sample on the verse Thom has turned into a gibbering wreck. A month later 'Lucky' is chosen as a lead trackon the Help project's first EP. It's generally acknowledged as the finest thing on the album. It's not playlisted by Radio One.

Eventually, of course, we do reach the party. And there is alcohol. And there is music. And there is Roger Taylor from Queen. As you wander around the weirdly dub-tastic bar it's difficult not to conclude that just about every cliche about Radiohead is both true and hopelessly off the mark. Yes, they're the band that did 'Creep'. But they're also the band that did The Bends. Sure, they can be miserable, truculent sons-of-bitches. But they can also be - far more frequently - some of the politest, drollest people you could ever meet. And OK, their reputation on wanton behaviour may have more than a grain of truth to it. But, given half a chance, they're more than capable of transforming into blurry - eyed beer monsters with serious love-you-like-a-brother inclinations. Tonight, for example, is definitely a blurry-eyed beer monster night. Even Thom is in high spirits and takes all ribbings about his freshly coppered barnet like a trooper ("I was just fed up with being blond. Maybe Tango would be interested in me being slapped around the face by some big blob.") Predictably, after a brief rant by 'Cocktail King' Ed about how Delia Smith's promotion of humble cranberry is making the ingredients of his favourite cocktails impossible to find, talk turns to the band. In particular the future. After all, they've been 'That Band With The Great Single' and 'That Band With The Great Album'. What next? "The thinking at the moment is that the next record is going to be very up," explains Colin. "Just go in and do it. We just seem to be on a roll. I mean, we were only going to perform 'Nobody Does It Better' once on MTV. But we liked doing it so much that we've carried on. Mmm... Maybe an album of Bond themes wouldn't be such a bad idea". "Samplers!" Thom suddenly announces as a smirk ripples across his face. "That's the next thing we're getting. Nevermind video cameras and Powerbooks. Samplers are the future. Now all I've got to do now is convince everyone else..."

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Select, early 1996

Interviewer - Did you start to think the REM tour was cursed?

Colin: We did consider it. We had all our gear nicked just as we left the tour - I think it was someone telling us that we should have got off a bit sooner. In fact, all their illnesses happened when we weren't with them. I think we were a kind of their lucky rabbits foot.

Interviewer - You've met a lot of heroes this year.

Thom: Yeah. Michael Stipe and Elvis Costello were the two people I really wanted to meet. I guess the only one left now is Tom Waits.

Colin: It was very strange. I mean you'd be sitting there on a sofa with Patti Smith on one side and Michael Stipe on the other.

Interviewer - What did you say to them?

Colin: I just asked them what they'd like to drink. It's times like that your English training in hospitality comes to the fore.

Interviewer - And lets not forget Soul Asylum.

Colin: Really Nice people.

Ed: Very friendly.

Colin: Very friendly people. Although personally not my favourite cup of tea. The lead singer invited us to all go and jam with them at the Hard Rock Cafe. But, unfortunately, we'd already packed our gear away……

Interviewer - In '94 you video'd your every move. In '95 you bought powerbooks. What's next on the techno superhighway?

Thom: Samplers. Ha! In my dreams.

Colin: Well Jonny's just got an environmental - friendly stunt kite.

Ed: I think we're probably going to go back to basics. Polaroid's, Etch-o-sketch. Painting the side of the bus with charcoal. That kind of stuff.

Colin: I'm actually using my Powerbook to write the unauthorised biography of Radiohead, including all the scandal that never makes the press. You know, which members of the band are on the seven step programme. Which ones are in wacky religious cults. Which ones are pederasts. I hope to then sue myself. It would be quite an earner.

Interviewer - What's with the barnet, Thom? Have you jumped the ginger bandwagon?

Thom: Is there a ginger bandwagon? Who else is on it?

Interviewer - Chris Evans, Mick Hucknall..

Thom: Oh well all the right sort of people then.

Interviewer - Has anyone called you carrot top yet? Or Duracell features? Tango Head?

Thom: Someone said 'You're a fucking vegetable, ginger' That's pretty good. Maybe Tango would be interested in me being slapped around the face by some big blob.

Interviewer - In Clueless, 'Fake Plastic Trees' is playing and Alicia Silverstone moans about how American students only ever listen to 'complaint rock'?

Colin: There's is an early modern English literacy analogy to that, which is the poetry of complaint. Basically it was an oral tradition in which the peasants bemoaned their losses. And of course 'complaint' can also mean illness. So, it's good to see Alicia has a good grounding in literature.

Interviewer - There was also Soul Survivors on TV in which Ian McShane as a soul DJ says "Who the hell are Radiohead?"

Colin: It's no secret in the band that I am massive fan of Ian McShane. Maybe he'll record another one of those covers albums and do 'Creep'. Hopefully he could produce the same kind of emotion that he brought to Roxy Music's 'Avalon'.

Interviewer - Do we need a new Romantic revival?

Thom: We probably need it as much as we need people doing Wire songs and claiming them as their own.

Interviewer - Why don't 1FM play your singles?

Colin: They do play our singles. They just won't playlist them. They didn't playlist 'Lucky' anyway. Apparently they're turnoff tracks. They figure the moment a listener hears a song they'll lunge across the room and switch it off.

Interviewer - Do you think it's true?

Colin: Well…um… I don't think you could say that Radiohead write escapist music. It's not the kind of thing you want to take on holiday - unless you were holidaying in Beirut. Apparanetly Kate Adie's a big fan. No seriously. It kind of fits doesn't it?

Interviewer - You released one of the years most critically acclaimed LP's, and you saw Oasis and Blur grab the headlines. Did that hurt?

Thom: We haven't been around enough for it to really hurt. We've been through the same thing for three years. You know, buy the Guardian and there's Jarvis Cocker telling his life story again. I find this obsession with personalities offensive. I find it offensive that I have to read about Noel and Liam's extremely banal antics.

Interviewer - Who'd win a Greenwood - Gallagher tagteam wrestling match?

Colin: Jonny would be quite tasty with his mitts if he got a few in early on. No, I'd like to see Jonny and Noel in a guitar duel. They would cover 'The Devil Went Down To Georgia'.

Interviewer - Did the next U2 label piss you off?

Thom: No more than people saying I was going to be the next rock martyr. Actually, that was worse.

Interviewer - What was the best day of your year?

Ed: Recording 'Lucky'.

Thom: Yeah, when Jonny did his choir sample thing I was a gibbering wreck.

Colin: The first day of my holiday. Lying on a beach in Mexico.

Interviewer - What was your worst day?

Colin: Getting all our gear nicked.

Thom: I quite enjoyed that because everyone felt sorry for us all day. We went to this restaurant and got the best tables, free pizzas…. I was walking down the street and this tramp say' Sorry to hear about your gear.' The worst day recently was when we found out that Radio One weren't going to play 'Lucky'. We're waiting for the Karma police to come and sort it out.

Ed: The first day of my holiday. Lying on the beach in Mexico. And then looking over and seeing Colin.

Colin: I knew you'd say that.

Interviewer - Are Menswear all over?

Colin: I saw them in LA supporting the Charlatans - feisty young British boys displaying pluck and determination in the face of LA indifference. So, good luck to them.

Thom: Well, they'd be all over if they'd ever started. When we were recording 'The Bends' our producer John Leckie said he'd seen the band the night before. Apparently every A&R man in the country was there and the band were a bit lame. But the best bit was they were called Menswear! We all wet ourselves. It was the funniest thing I'd ever heard.

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NME, 12.09.1995

Boom Shake The Gloom!
by Andy Richardson


Thom Yorke stands alone backstage at Nottingham Rock City. He stares at the walls, stares at the floor and sighs. When the press officer approaches, Yorke looks up, his face a picture of discontent, then measures up the person next to his press officer - a journalist. An invader.

The press officer asks how he is and he lies "Fine," eyes wide, shoulders tight, hands hanging limp at his sides. For two minutes he tells her about his troubles, then wanders back to the dressing room and his girlfriend, still shuffling restlessly. A mass of contradictions, he wants to be here and he wants to be far away. He wants to be with his girlfriend and yet...he doesn't.

They talk for a few moments, then Yorke's girlfriend ambles off into the crowd. Yorke walks into catering, looks blankly at the food then returns to his dressing room. He sits briefly then drifts away yet again, unable to sit still for more than a minute...

Three hours later Yorke is again backstage, this time smiling. Nottingham enjoyed tonight's show. He talks to his girlfriend animatedly and for a fleeting moment, affectionately. Soon, she leaves and for a minute, Yorke is sullen and mumbling miserably, before shrugging off the disappointment and talking to two female fans who have procured backstage passes. One is from Japan and urges him to drink more vodka, though Yorke declines. The other is coy and gives him an inflatable birthday cake for Johnny. "Where did you get this?" he asks incredulously. "Oh, I found it in my house," she bluffs. The singer smiles his gracious rock star smile, places the cake on the floor and says he'll leave it outside Johnny's door.

Then he's off wandering again; amiable, chatting, snatching food where he can. All the time he's smiling, content that he performed well, pleased that tonight's gig was so good.

Clearly, this is not the Thom Yorke of old. The Yorke who was prone to panic attacks, spitting, swearing and desperately bleak moods. The people around him can't believe how comfortable and confident he is in this dressing room full of people. He's changing they reckon. And they're right. No longer crippled by an enormous, irrational fear of failure, there are times tonight when he positively revels in the acclaim and attention, when he enjoys being in Radiohead. When he feels momentarily satisfied. He can't quite believe how he got here, how easy it all now seems. Yep, Thom Yorke is lucky, and tonight he knows it. He really does.

The most important British band of 1995? it could well be Radiohead. It is Radiohead, after all, who have defined fashion rather than followed it, who have kept a healthy distance from the hedonistic excesses of Britpop and refused to indulge in cocaine binges, chic heroine habits and the brash arrogance of their contemporaries.

Radiohead are an exception. In 1995, most bands sought solace in an unreal world, in a Prozac and intoxicant-addled world of rose-tinted Englishness. Lyrics were filled with fantastic falsehoods and few dared to mirror the ideas and failings of a disaffected generation...except Radiohead.

And while Yorke talked at every turn about his inner turmoil he was too smart, unlike Courtney Love, to use his pain as a bargaining chip. Rather, he described his feelings with honesty, eloquence and dignity. He found ways to enjoy his somewhat precarious lifestyle without becoming an idiot. And, like the rest of Radiohead, he made a friend of reality despite living in an unreal world.

So backstage at Nottingham Rock City is a typical scene. Guitarist Johnny Greenwood ignores a collection of presents and 24th birthday cards and leaves for the sanctity of his modest hotel room. Drummer Phil Selway collects a small kit bag and heads home to his wife in Oxford: "I clock on and clock off." he says as he breezes past.

Guitarist Ed O'Brien leaves with his girlfriend, while Colin Greenwood sinks into a three-seater sofa with a large glass of Stolichnaya and cranberry juice. But I am sure he is the only one left, surrounded by a half-finished bottle of vodka and a row of paper cups soiled with fag butts.

Radiohead on tour is like a well-behaved public school trip. They are reliable and calm. They arrive on time and treat their crew and tour manager with respect. their only excesses are a drop of vodka and the occasional late night.

"I'm sure we'd probably all be much happier and better party monsters if we indulged in Class A drugs," Greenwood says later, wryly, "but we'd probably self-destruct six months down the line, which is what a lot of bands do. I'm not defending or condoning bands' use of drugs, it is a bizarre, precarious, insecure, paranoid, falsely comfortable, perspective-distorting lifestyle.

"Personally, we've never been a band to focus any energies in groupies or drugs or anything like that. I mean, I don't know any bands that do, to be honest - maybe I don't see it. We're quite a solitary band, but everyone is so different, you talk to each member of the band and you get a different answer."

The turnaround for Radiohead happened because of The Bends. Twelve months ago they were stuck at RUK studios, in Chalbert Street, northwest London, fuming with each other and causing endless tantrums and panic attacks. Both Greenwoods, O'Brien, and Selway wanted a break. Yorke insisted they carry on. in November, the issue was resolved when the band went to Mexico.

"It all just came out," Thom Yorke remembers, "all the stuff that we'd always been fighting and I think, when we started our little band, when we were kids at school, it was never really about being friends or anything. We were playing our instruments in our bedrooms and wanted to play them with someone else and it was just symbiotic. We never really thought about it.

"Years and years of tension and not saying anything to each other, and basically all the things that had built up since we'd met each other, all came out in one day. We were spitting and fighting and crying and saying all the things that you don't want to talk about and I think if we hadn't ever done that... I think that completely changed what we did and we all went back and did the album and it all made sense."

"It was like that typical Radiohead thing, things had been brewing," Ed continues. "We're not really confrontational with another. Things had been brewing and they basically came to a head. We were all completely knackered on this Mexican tour bus, 12 of us, with six bunks and they were about 5ft 6inches long, so you're getting no sleep. It was just ridiculous. It was something we'd been spending eight or nine years working towards and it was like, we'd never been totally honest with each other in terms of... We're not into bonding, we're friends and everything, but because of maybe our upbringing or the school that we went to we don't tell each other our problems. We deal with them ourselves. It's the only way you can deal with them."

"It's really shit to talk about that in interviews," adds Yorke, "because for most bands, it seems, there is this sort of thing about it's all ready and presented and it's like Here you go' and there's an angle and there's so on and so on and it's wonderfully easy to write about... And here I am just talking about how in Mexico we all just started swearing and crying and throwing things around."

The fighting in Mexico was productive, though. Somehow, it gave Radiohead fresh resolve and, most importantly, Yorke's belief in the band grew: "It was coming out rather than not coming out, do you know what I mean? I think it's something you fall back on. I'm really into this theory now that anything worthwhile is really difficult and if it's becoming easy it's time to fuck it up."

The only thing Radiohead want to fuck up now are the preconceptions of the press and public. Yorke is no longer the tortured, angst-ridden subject who prompted one newspaper to describe him as the rock star most likely to commit suicide. Sure, he can still be moody, surly, difficult and solitary, but at least he now manages to balance many potentially destructive characteristics.

"I get people coming up on the streets in Oxford," he says "saying, Can I have your autograph?' Sometimes I'll say Yes' and sometimes I'll be really, really rude because they'll catch me when I'm not being Thom Yorke from Radiohead, like in a restaurant or something or something and it'll be, No, piss off'. But then to have people come back and say, We heard you're a bit difficult, a bit weird, you're not very easy to talk to'. It's the circumstance that people are talking to you in, when people come up and they want a little bit of you, their two cents' worth.

And that to be perfectly honest is not why I got into this, and that's just me being honest. You feel like saying to them Look, this is not why I got into this, and I don't really give a flying fuck whether you have my autograph or not and I'd rather you didn't bother me because if I was anyone else in the street you wouldn't."

Plainly, Yorke despises many aspects of fame, biting the hand that feeds him when it suits him. He pisses off business people to preserve his sanity and dismisses the press as self-serving and pointless because that protects him and his few close friends.

"I stopped reading the press when they printed I was going to top myself. And my girlfriend rings me up, really really upset, saying, What's all this, what have you been saying?' You know, that's when I stopped reading it. That was enough for me... But then I'm in this business, but I also want to be in this business on my own terms, you know."

Undoubtedly, the death of Kurt Cobain - who took a not dissimilar stance - and the consequent demise of grunge has heightened Yorke's position. He is now one of the most successful of a dwindling breed of songwriters who deal only in reality. In fact, only Richey Edwards was the only mainstream British lyricist in a similar position.

That was all sort of happening as The Bends came out," says Yorke. I had people warning me a few months before Richey disappeared, before he went away the first time, warning me that he was in a bad way and his behaviour was..." his speech trails off.

Taking stock, he continues. "I thought that basically it was the British press that did it to Richey. Full stop. Although I've got lots of friends who are journalists, the few who I think were basically responsible for him having a breakdown I will always hold responsible and I will always see what we do in that light."

He pauses again, leans forward, holds his hands in front of his chest and slowly, deliberately concludes: "And I think he is still alive."

Yorke is justly proud of The Bends in all its brave, mournful, agonisingly painful glory. While Oasis sang of champagne supernovas and Supergrass spoke of feelin' alright, The Bends described tortuous isolation and despair. It was bleak and vulnerable. The cover featured a photograph taken in hospital and the inside sleeve included line drawings of ostriches with their heads buried in sand. You didn't need to be a psychoanalyst to interpret the symbolism.

Now, though, Radiohead are emerging with uncharacteristic optimism. Yorke, inching towards acceptance of his rock star status, seems eager to start recording again.

"I don't know how good the new songs are," he says, modestly. "The jury's out."

He and the rest of Radiohead have already decided, however, not to make another album like The Bends. They don't want to push themselves through so much torment again, and besides, they've reached a level where they don't have to. Instead, they will try to record at a much more leisurely, relaxed pace: Yorke has told their label, Parlophone, that they want a year to make their next album. Apparently, the paymasters have agreed.

"You know, the big thing for me is that we could really fall back on just doing another moribund, miserable, morbid and negative record, like lyrically," he explains, "but I really don't want to, at all. And I am deliberately just writing down all the positive things that I hear or see. But I'm not able to put them into music yet. I don't want to force it because then all I'm doing is just addressing all the issues where people are saying that we're mope rock. As far as I'm concerned The Bends is like that because that was really, really where we were at when we did it. And you could say the same about REM's Automatic For The People. It's a really miserable record, you know."

Instead, Radiohead will record songs like Lucky, the stand-out track on War Child's Help compilation album. That was Johnny Greenwood's idea, to donate a song Radiohead were playing every night on tour which the fans loved even though they didn't know what it was. When Greenwood suggested it however, Yorke wasn't so sure.

"There wasn't that sense of screaming and fighting and being on the phone to people for ages and spitting and swearing anymore, I don't think. There was a sense of release to me, that was the thing, that was the thing I wanted. To me, Lucky was sort of like that. Lucky is a song of complete release. It just happened, writing and recording it, there was no time, no conscious effort."

Colin Greenwood adds: "I think we're learning not to think too much about stuff. Thought can be an inhibiting thing. I don't know if you've read Arthur Miller's autobiography Time Bends, but analysis can be crippling thing and self-consciousness can be a crippling thing, but it can also be a source of great creativity, and articulation of crises of thought can be a great thing in itself."

But Radiohead's change in attitude is not entirely down to the Mexican tête-à-tête. An equally important factor was their summer-long tour with REM. It acted as a stress-reliever, freeing Radiohead of the pressure of headlining each night. They went onstage, played for 30 minutes and actually - God forbid - enjoyed themselves.

The relationship between Radiohead and REM, too, was far more civilised than that between most headline/support bands - especially when the headliners just happen to be one of the biggest bands in the world. When Radiohead joined the tour Michael Stipe took Yorke to one side and told him he was a fan. They socialised after gigs, talked about shared favourite songs - like REM's Drive and Radiohead's High and Dry - and Stipe explained how he became a phenomenon and managed to retain his integrity.

Yorke recalls: "Everything that we've come to expect was turned completely on its head, like the idea that you get to a certain level and you lose it and that's it - you're lost -and for everything to be amicable and there be no bitchiness or pettiness about it. Onstage REM were playing songs they've written, mucking around with the idea of being who they are and having no illusions about it - or seemingly so. And you compare that with a lot of what we feel when we are at home and it was just so different. It's just such a headfuck."

REM smashed Radiohead's preconceptions. They emerged strong and triumphant from the tour.

"A lot of it was like, yeah, we're the support band and you could go onstage and make a complete prick of yourself and the more the better, which I enjoyed doing for several months.

"It was a real full stop and it really opened things up. It took the pressure off and I could just observe, which really helped me. I got really, really drunk on night and was talking to REM about fame, and Michael Stipe was saying he went through exactly the same thing during the Green tour, when suddenly they went from being a band to being a phenomenon for the first time, and he was a phenomenon' or whatever. And I'm not really at that stage at all yet, we're not playing Wembley yet. But I suppose it's quite funny, that idea of everything that you do, 24 hours a day, that when you go and have breakfast or go out into the street, that every single minute of every single day you're conscious of the fact that people might be watching you, is really, really unhealthy. The whole cult of personality surrounding bands, I think, is pointless. And I think the 80s really bore that out.

"Obviously people want to know about the people that make the music, but by the end of it it was just becoming so pompous. Like with the whole U2 thing at the end of 80s, and like Madonna and so on, it all became an extension of the whole Saatchi and Saatchi concept that you can sell anything to anybody if you put it across the right way."

So when people referred to you as the "the new U2", did that annoy you for those reasons?

"That whole idea of being Thom Yorke the personality... I don't want to die having been just that. The whole thing that most pop stars are desperately trying to attain immortality is through the cult of their personality... this phenomenon, this Sunday review section, glossy front page... It's like NO!, actually. No I don't want to be remembered for this, I want to be remembered for doing pieces of work that people liked, and other than that I don't really want to know.' I'm not into this for immortality's sake. Sixty years from now, I'm going to be dead, and that will that.

"I made the fatal error. You know I was saying that I don't read any of the press? Well I read this thing because it was in the dressing room and it was saying something about, these people don't look like the sort of people who have looked death in the face and have walked away again', and I thought, Yeah, but I'm not here to prove who I really am'."

Radiohead still manage to separate the personal and the professional, leading separate lives when the band is inactive, travelling separately to gigs during tours. Selway drives to and from his home in Oxford, the gregarious Colin travels with the crew on their tour bus and O'Brien, Yorke and Greenwood drive with their tour manager in a hired Renault space. Soundchecks are chaotic affairs kept in sync by a tenacious sound engineer, while before and after shows, the five Radiohead members are rarely in the same place at the same time.

"I think the more we are doing and the more successful we are being," says Colin Greenwood, "the harder it is to deal with on a personal level and to connect with personal wants and needs and personal life. You understand why people get caught up with quick fixes like drugs because it is quite a numbing experience. I was thinking about Blind Melon with No Rain, they had already toured that album at least twice before it was a success and they had to tour it again. And you can go mad. It's bizarre, it's like being in a band is a privileged, rarefied existence and you should never get complacent about it but at the same time there are pressures about it. It's interesting for me to be back here where I did my degree (Cambridge) and think about how far we've come and how far you can travel and how many places you can see, but you can still be unhappy about yourself as a person and the way you are, emotionally or intellectually."

Radiohead remain fiercely self-critical. Their level of self-analysis is acute, so that whenever anyone writes anything bad about them they've already thought or said it. But then, they revel in the paradoxes and contradictions they create.

"My father asked the other day how it was going," confides O'Brien, "and I said, Oh you know, it could be better from our point of view'. It's similar to when someone suffers from bulimia and looks in the mirror and thinks they're too fat when they're really thin. We're getting this amazing response from people and we're thinking it isn't good enough."

In January they will take a month off. Selway will spend time with his wife, Yorke will travel around Europe trying to avoid The Bends, O'Brien will go to India and Colin will move to London.

Yorke says : "The only other person I ve ever talked to about this is Michael Stipe and he just said, It takes me 6 months to come down from a tour at least, now, or more than that', so I can understand it actually now. All the emotions and all the tensions and the freak-outs are all stocked up and they all come seeping out at the end so you have to keep it together. It's the same with the live situation. Sometimes I think it's just amusing and it's just a joke and I just enjoy that rather than fighting it any longer."

The night after Nottingham Rock City, Radiohead play Cambridge Corn Exchange. It is another good concert. At 11.40pm, Yorke leaves his dressing room and sits at the bottom of the stairwell.

"The secret, that I'm slowly discovering, is that if you don't feel anything inside for what you're doing it doesn't necessarily mean that it's not working. It just means that you can't possibly mean it all of the time and if you do you're a sad fuck."

Is there more self-confidence? Do you finally think, Yeah we are really good'?

No. I hope not. But that's the same with anybody really, or should be. If you wake up every morning thinking fuck me I'm great', you're a boxer or something."

And are you learning, finally, to enjoy it?

"It barely pays the bills, really, but what's really scary is when you start hearing people saying things like, At least you don't have to work for a living', and it's fuck yeah'. You forget that... We are fucking lucky."

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