It's early afternoon in an extremely exclusive Hamburg hotel and Thom e Yorke, Radiohead's pint-sized pop star incarnate, is bored. Sitting slumped across a dinner table in the hotel bar, Mr Yorke hardly looks like a singer about to embark on the biggest European tour of his life. He's in the mood for moaning and no one, not the band and certainly not some journalist, is going to persuade him otherwise. "Do I have to?" he wails, taking another sip from his bottle of not very rock 'n' roll mineral water. "I've been asked about this four times already today. I'm bored!" Thom doesn't want to talk about Creep, Radiohead's unofficial anthem and biggest hit single to date. He buries his head in Geek Love, this week's book, and we decide to change the subject.
Radiohead, five pale boys from Oxford, are without doubt the hottest property in pop music right now. Kate Moss loves them. Michael Hutchence name-checks them at every possible opportunity and Suede's own sex god, Brett Anderson, considers them second to none. Even Jason Donovan is trying to get in on the act. "I just love the Radioheads!" he blithely but cluelessly told a journalist recently.
Having formed the band in 1986 when they were still at Abingdon School in Oxford, Thom, guitarists Jonny and Ed, bassist Colin (Jonny's older brother) and Phil, the group's drummer, signed to EMI records in 1991. Their Dinosaur JR-meets-The Smiths debut couldn't have arrived at a worse time, though. The Thames Valley scene was long gone and grunge was already deemed yesterday's news. As Suede's glam rock took the charts by storm, the press decided that Radiohead, with their geeky looks and sensitive lyrics, were just too unfashionable to champion.
But America, and MTV in particular, decided otherwise. Within weeks of picking up on Creep (a single previously snubbed when first released in the UK), the five unknown lads from England turned into America's most-wanted group. Pablo Honey, their debut album, has already sold more than half a million copies in the USA alone, and is said to be outselling Suede's album, Suede, by 15 to one. Radiohead, once dubbed the "ugly ducklings of pop", are beginning to look very pretty indeed. The band are in Hamburg - and right now Hamburg might as well be Manchester for all the group care. It's freezing, it's already dark and it's pouring with rain. As train after train passes through the station just outside the hotel window, Hamburg, sex city of Germany, couldn't look more depressing. The group have been here almost a day now, but no one's bothered to venture outside the hotel grounds.
Radiohead, Britain's most fashionable export, are gradually growing used to life on the road. "We've had a freak hit single," insists Thom, his freshly-washed peroxide hair dripping water on his skimpy-fitting, low-cut black top. "At the stage we're at, and for a song to go that high [Creep made number seven in the UK charts second time around] is just a freak incident. We don't expect it'll ever happen again. We're being realistic. We've come from nowhere, and suddenly we're in the top 10 — that's the stuff of dreams. What success we have had so far is no big deal. No one takes it seriously. If we took it seriously we'd turn into everyone's worst nightmare, start acting like real assholes, and split the band up."
In the hotel lounge, Radiohead are arguing in typical Radiohead fashion. Thom is moaning about where they should place Creep (or "Crap", as he likes to refer to it) in tonight's set. It's not that he hates the song or anything, it's just that he doesn't want Radiohead to be considered just another one-hit-wonder band.
"Creep was the introduction," explains Ed O'Brian, a six-foot-five giant with model-like facial features, heavily-gelled dark hair and purple Levi's. "We had fans in America come up to us and tell us they were sick of Creep. We were like: 'Yeah! We know. That's exactly what we think.' The success of Creep has pissed us off because no matter what we seem to do now, we're still the band who made Creep. We have other songs you know!" Ed is Radiohead's token (sensitive) lad - more comfortable ranting about the shocking state of English football than the latest single release on Creation. He's just returned from the toilet where, he assures us, two people were making out in the cubicle next to him. "I was going to offer them both a fag when they'd finished banging themselves up against the toilet door, but I decided against it." The rest of the group, still slumped in their seats, consider paying a visit to the toilets to applaud the sexually-charged couple, but decide that it wouldn't exactly be a very Radiohead thing to do. Radiohead are not your average heroin-flirting, hotel-trashing, bed-hopping rock 'n' roll band.
"Our life isn't one big Guns N' Roses video," Thom assures me, unnecessarily. There isn't one alcoholic drink on the table in front of me and the only sign of decadence is Colin puffing away on a cigarette. "That life doesn't exist in the real world. This rock 'n' roll lifestyle that everyone seems to harp on about is just so sad. I mean, who's going to die of AIDS first? Us, or Guns’N' Roses?" he asks, rhetorically.
"There're a few unspoken roles about being a member of this group," insists Phil, the group's most talkative member.
"First of all, we don't fuck groupies. You don't take advantage of your fans. We never pulled before we were in a band, so why should we start now? We'd only be kidding ourselves. The second no-no is cocaine. We steer clear of hard drugs. Taking hard drugs in a rock band is just so predictable it's pathetic. If a band goes out on tour, gets coked up, and then starts chasing groupies - then I'm sorry, but you've lost the fucking plot. Fucking big time!"
Thom returns to his book while the others try and grab some sleep on the seats in the hotel foyer. After tonight's show they're travelling south to Frankfurt — another night with little chance of sleep, Colin moans. The band's road crew should have arrived in Hamburg hours ago. A mild panic is beginning to set in. Radiohead are due to soundcheck on the other side of town in under half an hour, and they haven't even seen a guitar since they arrived. Thom ignores the fretting and amuses himself filling in a questionnaire from an obsessive fan who compiles Pop is Dead, Radiohead's one-and-only fanzine. It's packed front to back with press cuttings, letters and unreal reviews of the group's past concerts. "I got punched by another fan as I grabbed Thom for one orgasmic moment," claims one such review, while another insists (in true Kathy Bates Misery fashion), "Dearest Radioheads, us Brits love you just as much as your American fans. In fact we love you more!"
"I don't think any of our fans people would call obsessive are obsessive in an unhealthy way," counters Thom, "although we did once get a letter from a person on Death Row in America. He said that our records really said something to him personally. That was slightly weird..."
The concert itself, Radiohead's first supporting Manchester superstars James on the James Get Laid Four, goes down so well with the German audience that even Thom can't help sounding happy. Throwing himself about the stage in a red-and-black polka-dot blouse from Top Shop which wouldn't look out of place on the back of one of the Manic Street Preachers, Thom looks every inch a rock star, albeit one of the non-Axl variety. The boys at the front in their Pablo Honey T-shirts throw themselves about as Jonny crunches his guitar louder and louder. The babes, a mixture of Roxette looka-likes and adidas-wearing girls who could have just walked off a Jamiroquai video shoot, steer clear of the mosh pit, content to dance at the back and stare at Thom as he screams "I wish I was special, you're so fucking special" as if his life depended on it being perfect.
Thom leaves the stage smiling. "That was all right, you know," he says, his voice strained. Not too strained, though, to deny him one last moan. "I'm still upset that no one seems to care about us in Britain. I know people tonight seemed to like us, and we've got some really devoted fans in America, but we're a British band and it hurts to come home to England. All we want is to be liked by the people who live in the same country as us. Is that asking too much?"