Radiohead's spiky-haired, petite singer Thom Yorke and his lanky, wonderfully cheek-boned sidekick, guitarist Jonny Greenwood, aren't exactly behaving like rambunctious rising rock stars.

Let's put it this way. Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious they're not.

As representatives for two of this decade's best albums - The Bends in 1995 and its more experimental, expansive cousin OK Computer this year - the low-key Yorke and Greenwood sit side-by-side on a couch in a Toronto hotel room looking like they'd rather be strapped into a dentist's chair than have to answer any questions.

At one point, Yorke actually gets off the couch and starts pulling the Murphy Bed out of the wall.

But seeing as it is OK Computer that brings Radiohead to Arrow Hall in Mississauga on Tuesday night for a sold-out show - they previously played the Opera House in June, where the tickets were gone in 46 seconds - promoting the album is part of the package.

"Personally I have enough trouble getting through the interviews," says Yorke, when asked how Radiohead's live show will evolve as they play increasingly bigger venues, "let alone thinking about how we're going to make ourselves look even grander. Just five blokes on stage with a load of amps."

It seems getting the two soft-spoken, at times sullen, musicians to say anything at all, at least initially, is like pulling teeth.

"My brain switches off when you say the word market," says Yorke about Radiohead sales in Canada compared with the rest of the world.

As it turns out Canadians, along with the British, have been much more receptive to the band's moody, expansive rock - dubbed "New Grave" by the British press - than Americans. Although that may change. During a recent New York gig, Madonna, and members of U2, R.E.M., Oasis and Blur all reportedly showed up to catch Radiohead's killer live show.

"We're still going to go to America and find ourselves playing in a 1,200-capacity club venue that we've played four times before," says Greenwood. "There's still lots of things holding us very firmly on the ground. Canada is a bit of a blip."

Adds Yorke: "It's scary really. Walked down the street here, there's a hassle. Very strange. I still hear screaming in my head."

OK Computer has sold 105,000 copies in Canada as compared to 170,000 in the U.S., where about double that was shipped. The Bends is at a platinum-and-a-half status in Canada, while Radiohead's debut, 1993's Pablo Honey, is closing in on platinum.

Eventually Yorke and Greenwood do warm up, if you can call it that.

For example, they share a laugh about previously touring with Alanis Morissette.

"That was fun," says Greenwood. "That was so surreal and peculiar that we just felt very detached from everything that was happening. We had all these songs that we thought were okay and shamelessly this tour came up, playing in front of 13-year-old girls, and we thought let's go and do a Pink Floyd in front of them."

Adds Yorke: "We were doing whole sets of stuff that nobody knew. It was like rehearsing for 10,000 people that didn't give a s---"

Turns out nothing could be worse than the interview experiences they had following their first hit, 1993's "Creep", a tune that ultimately became the bane of their existence.

"We had to escape 'Creep', we don't have to escape The Bends," says Yorke. "After about six months there was nothing more to say about it and then it went on for another two years."

On to the material from The Bends and OK Computer then, whose often tortured lyrics, as sung by Yorke's gorgeous, choir-boy voice, have lead to comparisons to every other great band out there including U2 and R.E.M.

"As long as they keep changing we don't really care," says Greenwood of the comparisons. "Usually it lasts for a few months and then journalists change their mind and we're Pink Floyd again."

Music aside, one thing that does set Radiohead apart from that impressive pack is their elaborate videos, which never fail to impress.

"I don't think that anybody in the band has any talent as far as video-making is concerned," says Yorke. "I tried that at art college, it was too much grief. It was too many things to carry around in one go. So we just choose people who we really love their work."

The band most recently picked up an MTV Video Music Award for the astonishing cartoon that accompanies OK Computer's first single, the three-part, six-and-a-half-minute "Paranoid Android".

Despite the video's S&M imagery, bare breasts and amputations, it has been playing on music channels pretty much uncut. "It's strange that the only thing they really find offensive is the breasts," says Yorke. "I mean they don't find offensive the man chopping his limbs off, they don't have a problem with that. But women's breasts, they have a problem with that. They'll just do that nice, soft-focus thing over the nipples."

Despite their latest album's title, Yorke isn't a big fan of computers, although he admits Radiohead has used them to record music.

"They're quite boring and they're very slow and they're very stupid but they kind of do cool things as well," he says.

And both Yorke and Greenwood insist there was never any pressure to follow up the overwhelming critical success of The Bends, which made its way on to practically every Top 10 list of 1995 including one publication that called it "the best album of the decade."

"They only really started saying it about half-way into the recording of this album," says Greenwood. "It took ages for people to say anything nice about that record (The Bends)."

Still, the band retreated to actress Jane Seymour's house just outside Bath to make OK Computer.

"It just sort of got a bit out of hand," says Yorke, "as it is now. It's a bit ridiculous what they're writing at the moment. It's good, it's nice, but it's a bit silly. It's just a record."

Yorke got his revenge recently against the British publication Melody Maker - "they're the ones who said I was going to kill myself" - by blowing off an interview with a journalist who had came all the way from London to Oxford. He ended up interviewing the rest of the band.

"It's my favorite thing that has ever been written about us. I love it," says Yorke, offering his first genuine smile of the day. "My total contribution to that is three lines, and the rest of it is him ranting. If he didn't get an interview with me, he was going to get fired. That's the hilarious bit about it. So when I got in the car and drove off, he was a bit upset."