THE reviewer from The Dallas Morning News was not impressed. "The quintet milked melancholia with abandon, moaning one ballad of self-pity after another," he opined. Were it not for the "occasional journeys into spasmic punk", this "operatic mope-rock" would have been "one long bummer".

Which is one way of looking at it.

The wrong way, but there you go.

When records are as dazzling as Radiohead's The Bends there is always the risk that some listeners will be blinded by the light.

The Bends came out in March. It was Radiohead's second album, the follow-up to Pablo Honey - a record that had sold well over a million copies around the world on the back of a genuine world-beating hit single. 'Creep' was a phenomenon, a song with a signature riff that could shift furniture and a lyric sung by a frail, fragile-looking boy with a lazy eye. It became an anthem for doomed youth - well, white college-kid Americans anyway.

"I'm a creep, I'm nothing special "

The album itself was nothing special either, a patchwork of demo recordings bashed out in three weeks. The dominant music press image of Radiohead - middle-class public schoolboys from Oxford who were signed to a major label and had fluked a hit - was conveniently pat.

When news came that Radiohead's second album was nearly a year behind schedule, was turning into a nightmare in the studio, there was little surprise. Or interest.

Quickly, The Bends changed all that. From the opening howl of desert wind on 'Planet Telex' to Thom Yorke's final, plaintive plea to "immerse your soul in love" from 'Street Spirit', The Bends is an astonishing album. Whether it is the climactic punch of the title track, the thick hurt of 'Fake Plastic Trees', or the debilitating ballad 'Bulletproof', The Bends is utterly compelling and never less than invigorating.

Bruised and bruising, melancholic and vitriolic, anthemic but poetic, huge but intimate, this was, as it moved me at the time, the sound of humdrum rock lashed into brilliance by one man's howling turmoil and one band's grasp of light and shade. Album of the year, no question.

Thom Yorke lies back on the lawn of the Starplex Amphitheatre in Dallas and stretches in the Texas sun. His sunglasses are his only concession to his location; otherwise he wears a heavy, battered leather coat and tattered jeans held together by good luck. Down over the lawn, under the stadium roof, over the seats, REM are soundchecking with a jaunty vaudevillian instrumental of the kind occasionally reeled out by Blur.

Radiohead are midway through a three-week tour supporting REM, to be followed by another stint opening up for Soul Asylum. These are their third and fourth American tours this year, their biggest shows yet.

"It's a weird situation to be in," Yorke says. "To be the stadium rock band it's ok to like." That big sound, the one that lets them find their feet in such big sheds with ease, the one that's had Radiohead tagged as 'the new U2' or 'the new Queen', he puts down a love of "the whole Phil Spector thing, huge-sounding instruments. For me it's so much more evocative. It's not because we want to change the world. It's simply because the other side to that is it's a reaction against everything else we're hearing.

Not really in Britain, Britain is diverse enough for you not to have to react against it, there's enough going on. But over here everything's exactly the same, everything's dry. That whole inverted integrity about having everything completely in your face. Which I find completely ... nothing left to the imagination whatsoever."

Yorke stumbles over the words, roused from his habitual shyness by the force of the music. It was in similar circumstances that Radiohead nearly imploded two years ago. 1993 was 12 months of solid touring, notably in North America, in support of 'Creep'. Unprepared for this level of demand and activity the young band came to the verge of implosion as a catalogue of ills - physical, psychological, chemical - threatened to overwhelm them.

On the one hand, says guitarist Jonny Greenwood, "we joined this band to write songs and be musicians, but we spent a year being a jukebox instead. We felt, creatively, in a kind of stasis for a year and a half because we couldn't release anything new." On the other, when they did finally go into the studio in early 1994, "we were playing like paranoid little mice in cages," remembers Yorke, "not us playing like we play normally. We were so frightened, so shit-scared about getting this record right. Every act and every note you played was a real major deal".

They broke under the pressure, bolting to a series of long-planned shows in Australia and the Far East.

When they returned to Oxford last year, they were a band reborn. They knew their strengths as a live band, which new songs were working.

They junked much of the earlier recordings and songs. The travails of touring and the personal traumas, the surreality of being the boys in the bubble - "You go from being a band that's pretty inconsequential on EMI's worldwide roster to being a priority up there alongside Pink Floyd" - poured from Thom Yorke.

And somehow Yorke managed to make his motel laments, his weariness at this plastic entertainment world, his precarious health, sound like the most liberating, resonant, universal rock music around. Certainly not "operatic mope-rock".

The listener feels what the singer feels.

Out of earshot of Yorke, Jonny Greenwood has a theory. "There was this tradition of leaders of Mesopotamia or somewhere of cutting themselves in public and sacrificing their own blood and throwing themselves into the audience. And maybe Thom is doing that. But probably not."

"I went out for a meal with Michael Stipe," says Yorke. "I find it alarming the sort of things that happen to him. As a magnet of all sorts of bizarre debris, people, nutters. He was saying he had a really difficult time on the Green tour where he didn't quite want this to happen actually.

"What Stipe does is immerse himself in it. He reads everything that's written about them. Which is what I used to do. But I found there was so much bad I couldn't read it. I had to stop reading all of it. Personally I've had things written about me that have really really hurt. It's not actually that nice to be called ugly more than 10 times in a year in the press. I didn't get into this fucking business because l was beautiful."

On stage that night Radiohead are sensational. Middle America just wants to hear 'Creep' but it is a new song that makes the night. 'Lucky' is quietly epic, a shaft of hope beaming from Thom Yorke's dark night of the soul. Better musicians and stronger people for the experiences that gave them - literally - The Bends ("severe pain, cramp and difficulty in breathing caused by a sudden and substantial chase in atmospheric pressure"), Radiohead are riding the wave of international acclaim, not drowning in it.

'Lucky' is the standout track on the Warchild album Help, and is the lead track on the project's first EP (out last week). For both causes, that of children in Bosnia and that of Radiohead, 'Lucky' is the perfect song. "I'm on a roll, I'm on a roll - It's going to be a glorious day"