“I’m optimistic about the future. You have to be. If it was just about the world being dark then you wouldn’t ever do anything to try and illuminate it. As you get older you have to let go – it’s like falling backwards and thinking you’ll be caught.”

What’s this? A motivational speaker? Clare Rayner? David Brent? Nope, it’s Radiobead bassist Colin Greenwood, all loved up and laughing somewhere in the Italian Alps, just outside Milan this summer.
For since the release of Hail to the Thief and this summer’s shows, a new Radiohead has been in evidence. No longer the bemoaners of the modern world’s ills they’ve been since 1997’s OK Computer, or the even bleaker Kid A and Amnesiac (“the sound of a deeply, deeply unhappy band kicking against everything in a scattergun approach,” says guitarist Ed O’Brien).
Now Radiohead have discovered not exactly daisies and sunsets but an accommodation with the way the world is and the closest they’ve come to positivity.
“The big difference for me with this record and where we’re going is there seems to be a renewed faith in some kind of future,” says Greenwood, Both he, O’Brien and even Thom Yorke use the word “optimistic” twice apiece in our interviews, a word hitherto used only as an icily ironic Kid A track title.
You can certainly hear this new positivity in the music: there’s a sense of energy on tracks like new single 2+2=5 in contrast to Kid A’s enervation, the slurred hand-claps on We Suck Young Blood are Radiohead’s (okay, rather twisted) version of humour, while both I Will and A Wolf At the Door express anger as a desire to act rather than turn inwards and await.
Just don’t try telling Thom Yorke any of this. In the cobbled backstage area of the Lazzaretto, Bergamo, Yorke instinctively squashes what be perceives as an “angle”.
“No, you’re wrong, I think the world’s even worse now,” he snaps.
Yorke is a far, far more personable character than be is ever depicted – polite, passionate, funny with an engagingly geeky laugh, and a touching fondness for the kids’ TV his new son Noah has brought him into contact with (especially Bagpuss). However Yorke is trapped in a permanent, contrary, Kevin the Teenager relationship with the media.
You have to be patient, but eventually though, he will admit, “Well, yes, there are little epiphanies. Sail to the Moon is positive.” Then he adds, as if it’s a marker of his very identity. “But it doesn’t mean that I slot in any better.”
Finally though, Yorke admits: “Kid A was definitely withdrawal. The language and the music all had this disembodied, dislocated thing. That whole period had the sense of being frozen. There was an [unrecorded] song called I Froze Up which in some ways was the key to the whole period. I just froze. It really didn’t feel like I could move.
“Obviously I don’t have that now. When you’re a dad you’re less inward-looking. I guess this is more of an engagement thing.”
By this stage Yorke is a virtual wellspring of positivity, even on traditionally areas of negativity, like politics.
“I’m really optimistic at the moment,” he now admits. “People are like ‘fuck this’ – we aren’t benefiting from this. The Iraq war was the first example of proper public resistance. Not like waving red flags around in the Eighties, it was just like ‘we don’t want this to happen’.
“Then you’ve got the rise of union resistance to Labour. And in countries like Argentina people are taking to the streets. It’s a very dangerous time for those in authority because the basis for western democracy was the trickle down theory and the game’s kind of up.”
While he’s happier talking about politics than his private life (“if you want personal stuff, you’re not going to get it,” he warns) he’s still wary of misinterpretation: “I’m not anti capitalist. It’s not like fucking smash the whole system, that’s just the media’s way of dismissing these movements as naïve or as left wing Ioonies.
“It’s about accountability within the existing system. And I think we can do a number of things. I think we can get the IMF disbanded, and the World Bank too. We can get the World Trade Organisation to make trade fairer. All these are achievable.”
Yorke says however that it’s the rediscovery of power of music that has been Radiobead’s most potent healer.
“All this ranting I’ve been doing – I’ve found that when I’m playing music I can channel all this frustration into it, because that’s the best place for it. It’s escapism because everything that’s wonky and isn’t right, is right when we’re playing. All that anger that maybe was welling up during that period was able to come out in a way that was beautiful not ugly.”
If you needed any proof of this, it’s provided by the show in the Lazzaretto. Its seventh century arches and cloisters surround a huge classical courtyard, the Alps sit majestically behind the stage, the sky is purple and the moon orange... and Radiohead are on absolutely blinding form.
There’s Yorke’s irresistible geeky dancing, the closest he’s ever got to expressing sheer raw, naked joy in public; there’s the energy in the new songs, the way Greenwood bounces up and down like an excitable toddler between tunes; and the fact that everyone in the band – even Yorke – now breaks spontaneously into grins while playing.
And the crowd respond in kind. Rather than being a depressing experience, a Radiohead show is, these days, a communal celebration. People brush tears away during Fake Plastic Trees, they hug each other during Exit Music (For A Film) and sing the “rain down” bit of Paranoid Android with the dedication of Gregorian monks.
Even the tougher Kid A stuff sounds uplifting the way Radiohead play it now: Idioteque sounds more like it’s bailing a thaw than an Ice Age, Everything In Its Right Place has lost its sense of irony, while the new album’s The Gloaming seems to be lighting our way through the darkness rather than just plunging into it.
Radiohead seem to have become – in their own peculiar way – the people’s band, holding a hopeful light up to the future. Who’d have thought it?

Radiohead’s new single, ‘2+2=5’ is released on Nov 17 on Parlophone. The band appear live at the MEN Arena in Manchester on Nov 22, Newcastle Telewest Arena on Nov 23 and Nottingham Arena on Nov 2. Visit: www.radiohead.com