MISSING out on last years Brit Pop band wagon turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to Radiohead. Passed over by critics as the likes of Elastica, The Bluetones and Pulp", cashed in their chips to claim their 15 minutes, Radiohead became the ugly ducklings of Brit Pop, The Band That Missed The Boat. Gradually, though, helped by a series of stunning videos for singles such as High & Dry and Street Spirit, the months went by, the momentum grew, and Radiohead's album, The Bends released last year, is now widely regarded as the most accomplished and enduring of the lot.
These days it's almost impossible to see the name Radiohead without the words "the next "REM", "Britain's answer to Nirvana", or "the U2 it's OK to like" written alongside it. Their first release since The Bends, the single Lucky, was so obviously the stand out track on the Bosnia Help compilation that Melody Maker wrote:
Radiohead are no longer capable, of anything other than brilliance. America obviously agrees, responding to Thom Yorke's almost adolescent sense of social anxiety and unease, his dark sentimentality, embracing the band as a kind of Oasis With Intellect. Sometimes it seems the only choice ahead of Yorke is whether he should take on the band's newfound stadium status with his integrity intact like Michael Stipe or with the shameless complacency of a band like Simple Minds and turn into Jim Kerr.
Sleepy eyed and pale, quizzical as a cartoon with his tatty Woody Woodpecker haircut and his thin bones lost inside crumpled clothes, Thom Yorke just doesn't look cut out for a superstar's job. He is 27, five foot five, clean and English and indulgent, his punched in face scrunched up into a permanent scowl.
Born with one eye closed and paralysed, Yorke grew up used to being the victim. He had five major operations before the age of six, and spent a year wearing an eye patch and being laughed at by the other kids, who called him Salamander. Maybe he has been getting up on stage all this time simply to shove his, defects, his disability, in the audience's faces, challenging people to reject him on an even bigger scale. Except now they're worshipping him. No wonder he finds it confusing.
For years, the fuel to Radiohead's fire their whole raison d'etre has been their sense of inadequacy and anxiety, that they would never amount to anything. They have virtually fetishised the threat of failure, cultivating their sense of imminent collapse into a permanent state.
Formed bin Oxford, around the time of 1991's Summer of Love, and bonded by a love of bands like Magazine and Joy Division, Radiohead were instantly unfashionable, immediately out of step. Out of time.
Their first EP in May 1992, Drill (first chorus "I'm better off dead"), was refreshingly dark and insistent, invigorating enough immediately to win them a fiercely loyal following. But disaster struck when their second, Creep (with the chorus "I wish I was special /So f"**ing special/But I'm a creep"), became a one song phenomenon, an American anthem of alienation and self loathing, propelling their first album, Pablo Honey, into the American Top 40. In a self fulfilling prophecy, Yorke became "the creep guy".
Far from providing some sort of palliative for their neuroses, Radiohead turned success into something that only made matters worse. Encouraged by their American record company to capitalise, they toured the States for months, realising too late that they were still playing material that was more than two years old just another band that turns into the thing they hate.
"It took a year and a half to get back to the people we were ... to cope with it, emotionally," says Yorke. By then, says guitarist Jonny Greenwood, they were cooperating in a kind of stasis Thom was trying to shut off from every thing. The rest of us just weren't communicating. Sick of touring, by the time they went into the studio, they had become phobic about recording anything. Their confidence was shot.
Contrary to popular wisdom, it's often a band's second album that proves to be their most natural and direct expression, where they shake off their influences (in Yorke's ease early Elvis Costello) and get the confidence to be themselves. After resting and scrapping their early demos ("Guns `N' Roses pomp rock"), they returned to record The Bends in majestic form.
The title perfectly summed up the band's state of flux and Yorke's personal alienation that bordered on repulsion, brought on by the rigours and unreality of touring "Baby's got the bends/We don't have any real friends." The sense of malaise and self disgust becomes more and more palpable the more you listen to The Bends. Greenwood has said it shocked him, "how much it's about illness, doctors . . . it's a real medical album". But despite its success, they still perceive themselves as having never belonged, never been made welcome by the press or the industry.
The music press, too, has always treated Radiohead with suspicion. For a start, they can play their instruments (which is always a worry), with suspiciously mature, muso sensibilities. They have far too many ideas, layering their record's with strangeness and innovation, obviously aiming for something bordering on beauty.
Too MOR and too middle class, five students who first met at Abingdon boarding school, Radiohead are the sort of band who spend their time on their tour bus playing bridge. When I'm introduced to bass player Colin Greenwood (Jonny's brother), he's lending someone a book the socio economic history, The Collapse Of Power. "Radiohead Do Not Party" is practically a by law among music journalists. When support act David Gray trashed their dressing room, the story goes, Radiohead tidied it up.
The single Lucky encapsulated the sceptics worst fears a hauntingly uneasy ballad about Yorke's preoccupation with mortality, it includes a Pink Floyd sized guitar solo, offering Americans unbridled air guitar solo and lighter waving opportunities.
The common perception was that Radiohead, like Bush or The Cranberries before then, were heading for the American mainstream, a sort of alternative version of Tears For Fears, set to follow in the footsteps of bands like James and Simple Minds and sell out as soon as possible. Watching them sound check in New York, I can't say you'd notice.
True, the unnaturally affable Colin Greenwood and the drummer Phil Selway fulfil the Wyman and Watts roles with foot tapping aplomb. The others, though, can make for unorthodox, even uncomfortable viewing. Stage left, the tall, bug eyed figure of guitarist Ed O'Brien charges around performing a series of the most overly energetic leaps and glory poses since The Clash or The Who in their heyday.
STAGE right, Radiohead's second guitarist, the impossibly beautiful, charmingly bashful, Jonny Greenwood appears to spend most of his time plucking agitatedly at the wrong end of his guitar. He crouches on the floor, coaxing the sort of noises more closely associated with Van Der Graaf Generator the sort of thing that has older critics reaching for the word "extemporisation".
In the middle, Yorke strums away furiously on his guitar, like an unnaturally absorbed, slightly deranged busker, blessed with the voice of an anxious angel. "They love me like I was a brother/They protect me/Listen to me/They dug me my very own garden/Gave me sunshine/Made me happy," he sings, before tearing into the chaotic chorus, "Nice dream/Nice dreeeeam".
His baggy maroon cords falling over his shoes, and wearing a red Game Boy T-shirt and thin grey jumper, Yorke wanders around the empty auditorium with the sort of jaunty cockiness that reminds me of a Belfast schoolboy throwing stones at the soldiers. He is, predictably, a mass of contradictions a strange blend of snide cynicism, bitter self pity and earnest decency. There is still something studenty about him his sense of outsiderness his naively radical idealism.
He wants to change the charts, change the government, change the NME, and sits at home grumbling, shouting at the telly. He thinks the media should be "creative and informing, empowering", but says it's just a distraction instead, making a spectator sport out of fame.
Most of all, he worries. He worries about swearing too much, about being too nice or too nasty about not writing back to the fan mail he carries about in a duffle bag, ("not exactly fountains of Joy) about what the next album's going to sound like.
He worries about whether his life is becoming too glamorous and removed or too banal, too corporate. He sits there hugging his knees and scowling into space, worrying whether he's turning into Jim Kerr.
I can't help but point out that there was a time when Kerr used to spend his interviews talking about existentialism and the Speed of Life, the alienation and anxiety of travel and global communication, just like Yorke does now. And look what a travesty he turned into.
Of course, despite everything, Yorke is a jolly little chap. He's tough, with the sort of cocksuredness that likes to get into fights. He's prone to protecting his tetchy temper as a point of principle. He is getting fed up being treated like some sort of casualty, propped up on Prozac and poetic despair. He has started making jokes about being on heroin and attempting suicide, telling people if they want music to slash their wrists to, they should listen to The Smiths instead, even though that's what he did himself.
Still, for all his brave denials, as Jonny Greenwood says, "all Thom's songs eventually come down to how he's feeling" Talk to the others about him, and apart from an almost awe struck adherence to the belief that, he is the most articulate, interesting lyricist of his generation, what you find is a sense of protection.
They all say that the success of The Bends, combined with the support slot on REM's tour last year and their largest headlining gig to date 5,000 people in Toronto have done him the world, of good, "given him more confidence". Only an incident in Germany, described by NME as Thom's tantrum, clouded the idea that everything was going swimmingly.
"I freaked out. I couldn't sing. Threw stuff around. The amp, the drum kit ... I had blood all over my face. I cried for two hours, afterwards." His explanation that he was ill and couldn't cope with his strange medication, that he cracked up when his voice started giving out did nothing to allay the idea that he was undergoing some sort of burn out, like Bowie or Kurt Cobain. He jokes about his imminent demise doing wonders for his back catalogue, but stops when he realises it probably would.
Radiohead's dilemma is What To Do Next. What sort of band do they want to be? How big do they really want to get? "It's a very weird position to be in," Yorke shrugs. "To be the stadium rock band it's okay to like.
"I thought it might double my paranoia level, but it's exciting. It's actually more liberating, the idea that people might wanna hear it." Still, he can't help but sneer about "sit down audiences", and admits there is something truly disheartening about hearing thousands of American kids singing "I wanna perfect body" with none of the line's original pathos or irony.
What Yorke probably wants, of course, is the best of both worlds, something similar to the artists he most admires people like Elvis Costello, Neil Young or Tom Waits. "You know, just come back every three or four years, then go off and record an album down the bottom of the garden."
The predominant atmosphere in the band, they all make a point of saying, is "very positive". (Radiohead fans will, understandably, immediately start worrying.) "I think we've got back to how we were when we started. Same kind of excitement. Were so uptight generally, I wouldn't contemplate the idea of getting complacent. We're not used to people liking us, so I don't think it'll ever happen."
Yorke, for his part, is beaming. "All of us have been given great belief in ourselves. It's like a flash of release more than inspiration. I know we can do it now. The next album will be, about, that release. The way we re writing and the way we feel when we play together is about release now. And the new stuff is grateful and will hopefully be good because of that."