The only time the average pop musician sees 9.30 in the morning is when he hasn't gone to bed the night before. At 9.30am on a recent Friday though, Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood has already been up an hour and is bubbly - or as bubbly as he'll ever be - as he arrives at his manager's office. His girlfriend drops him off at the small studio complex off the high street of a thatch-roofed Oxfordshire hamlet, and then he strides across the courtyard, looking for all the world like "hubby" catching the train to the City. It's what happens when you retire at 11pm, an hour when otherother pop stars are just starting to wonder what to do that night. It is pretty obvious that Radiohead are not your workaday band, but their differences go beyond the hours Greenwood keeps. In a profession where credibility hinges on being (or seeming) working class, he, his bassist brother, Colin, singer Thom Yorke, guitarist Ed O'Brien and drummer Phil Selway are the well-spoken products of a genteel upbringing.
Jonny and Colin don't even have the rows that beset other pop brothers, preferring to trounce each other at bridge. ("Last year we got all this stuff saying: 'This band play Bridge and don't take drugs' They've never stopped to think that Bridge goes very well with drugs," says a piqued Jonny.) And their idea of rock n' roll naughtiness? Getting their friends to pose as them in 'phone interviews. As if the idea of bridge-playing rock stars weren't bad enough, they admit to having met at Abingdon public school, near their town of Oxford. Unlike Oxford's top popsters, Supergrass, Radiohead went on to university - which might be why Chris Hufford, the part time peacock breeder who manages both bands, refers to his charges at the 'Head and the 'Ass. Jonny, the youngest 'Head, was three weeks into a psychology degree when Radiohead signed with EMI. "It was actually my tutor who encouraged me to leave," he says, as if worried someone would think it was his idea.
Theirs were perhaps the propitious circumstances in which to form a band, and certainly no one would have predicted that "the Radioheads" (as fan Jason Donovan misnomered them) would become one of Britain's most respected groups. British success looked even less attainable when America discovered them first, via the single 'Creep', from their album Pablo Honey. The most requested track on American alternative radio in 1993, 'Creep' created an instant US following, with it's chorus - "I'm a creep, I'm a weirdo, I don't belong here" - became a rallying cry for sulky Midwestern youth. This worked against them at home, though owing to the suspicion that Americans make a pastime of liking the worst possible music.
Thus the Radioheads were unprepared for the raves that greeted the next album, 1995's The Bends. "Stunning" and "epochal" appeared in nearly every review, almost as frequently as "dark" and "disturbing". Singularly unsettling, The Bends provoked speculation as to how lyricist Thom could pull together such a monumental work while apparently in so fragile a state. ("Some of it might have been about me, but I'm over that now," is all he'll say about the bleak numbers like 'Street Spirit', a top five hit which went in part, "Cracked eggs, dead birds / Scream as they fight for life".)
Considered one of the most significant rock albums of the decade, The Bends (the title refers to the potentially fatal disorder resulting from surfacing too quickly from deep water) was the quintessential hard act to follow. Yet Radiohead have pulled off the rarest of feats - topping a powerful album with one of even greater intensity. EMI's managing director predicts that OK Computer - don't care much for the titles guys - will be the most influential album of the year. He would say that, but he could be right. Using The Bends' small-houred starkness as a starting point, it increases the dimensions, expands the role of guitar and keyboard, introduces a flowing sense of space. The whole thing is so sprawlingly ambitious that it demands a repeat listening. The first single 'Paranoid Android' is typical - a kind of 'Bohemian Rhapsody' for the nineties, composed of four separate movements ranging from sepulchral hymn to flailing rock-out.
"'Bohemian Rhapsody'?" frowns Yorke 15 minutes late and not ready to face the day. "No, lots of songs work like that, with different movements. Actually when I was nine, 'Bohemian Rhapsody' was the first song to blow my mind. I heard it at a friend's house, because the only piece of music my parents owned was an album of Scottish dancing that came with the record player." 'Paranoid' was chosen as a single "as a two fingers up to ideas of what singles are supposed to be like". It's as challenging as the Queen single was in its day, and who knows? - may also end up topping the charts for nine weeks. As it does on the rest of OK Computer. Yorke's thin whimper sounds shellshocked, despite the claim that he's actually happier than he was during The Bends sessions. Perhaps he just can't help sounding the way he looks, which is like the Before picture in a body-building ad.
Yorke is irked, in his well-bred way, by references to his appearance, which invariably get round to mentioned his left eye. He was born with a paralysed eyelid, requiring several operations and, at the age of six, an eyepatch for a year.
"It was the thing in the seventies that if you had unbalanced eyesight, they'd put a patch on to encourage the weak eye," he says, riled out of his relatively placid state. "If you wore one when you were six you got teased a lot." The suggestion that he must have been first choice for pirate roles in school plays provokes a pained smile as irritation battles with innate good manners.
"When you're six, you just try and get on with other people," he mumbles. But at 28, he might have added, you try to be conspicuously different. Take the peroxided haystack that made him look vaguely like a hip Rod Stewart - it has osmosised into a black crop, which complemented by black clothes, makes his skin look blue-white. Very cool indeed, which is why their manager's office is cluttered with Thom likenesses, delicately hand-inked by Japanese fans. The less ethereal Greenwood, on the other hand, might content himself with The Saying Of The Vikings, a book sent by EMI Norway to celebrate The Bends going gold there.
Is there a good case for Radiohead being, as Q Magazine put it "neurotics anonymous"?
"To be in the music business you have to be neurotic," Yorke begins. "I think she's trying to say we're all bed-wetters and nail-biters," interrupts Greenwood - whose penchant for kiteflying qualifies him as mildly eccentric, if not a paid-up bed-wetter. Actually, they don't come less rock animal than Greenwood, whose layman's approach to his instrument is a point of pride. "I'm always suspicious of guitarists who are precious about guitars. I've brought guitar magazines to tears with my lack of knowledge."
"I'm a lot more sussed than people think I am," Thom counters."A lot of powerful work comes from a feeling like... I don't have an adult frame of mind, though I do adult things. Just the thing of being a 28-year-old who one day is prepared to burn things down and the next day isn't can be a mind fuck. Being in a band turns you into a child, and keeps you locked in that frame of mind. You are constantly aware of being emotionally stunted."
How emotionally stunted? Well, Greenwood's declaration that they're "a fairly big drugs and groupies band" hints at a tad of stuntedness, whether it's true or not. (The drugs bit at least, probably isn't, given that Greenwood once had to call his manager "to have him talk me down - I'd done drugs the night before and I felt this insanity growing in my head. If you feel that bad the morning after, why bother with it?")
Are there any drawbacks to being the most erudite band in rock?
Greenwood, whose grey t-shirt sports the defiant logo "Dumb", thinks not. "The only drawback is that journalists get quite excited, jumping up and down because they get to show off the fact that they can use the word 'situationism'."
Yorke considers the question seriously. "Lots of people quote our records, and I'm not sure if that's good or not. The Bends is supposed to be about dealing with [traumatic] stuff and coming out the other side. It was supposed to be catharsis for listeners, too. I think people are missing the whole point of being in this band. The music sends you far beyond the words."
The words on OK Computer ("I like the fact that the title sounds like false optimism") are substantially indecipherable - on 'Exit Music', written for the Romeo and Juliet soundtrack, you can just about make out "We escape"; on 'Karma Police' "I lost myself" - so we'll have to take Yorke's word foor it that he's feeling, as another song title puts it, 'Fitter Healthier'. Does he reckon it will be the most influential album of the year, as the man from EMI says?
"I don't think so. It's just absorbed what's around and captured a moment, like The Bends did."
And how do they feel about the overall texture having been likened to the inner-space sound-scapes of Pink Floyd?
"The feeling we were aiming for was Bitches Brew by Miles Davis," sniffs an offended Yorke.
In fact, OK Computer - and the group - are out on a limb of their own, comparable to neither Pink Floyd, Miles Davies, nor anyone else. Which just goes to show that even a bunch of kite-flying bridge players can do this pop thing startlingly well.