‘Stop! Stop! Stop!’ hollers Thom Yorke mid-song. The other four members of Radiohead halt abruptly and a confused hush engulfs the 18,000 crowd at Toronto’s SkyDome. “This guy’s having a fit!’ cries Yorke urgently, pointing towards the front rows. ‘His eyes have gone out! Get security! Get an ambulance! Get him out of here!’ A young male fan’s frighteningly limp body is pulled out of the crowd and carried hurriedly away. ‘That looked really heavy,’ says the shaken frontman.
Happily, though, that moment is as dark as things will get in this particular Radiohead feature. As Yorke later tells the crowd, the fan is soon sitting up and chatting backstage. And even the enforced break in ‘Myxomatosis’, from the band’s current album ‘Hail To The Thief’, provides an unexpected bonus. Once the fan has been carried away, Yorke turns to the band, says, ‘Okay, third verse’ and they launch directly into the middle of the song, as if having just pressed a giant pause button. This undeniably impressive party trick sends the crowd into raptures.
Two days later, perched on a Central Park bench near the band’s New York hotel, Yorke admits he wasn’t sure the pause-button moment would work. “I said “third verse” and then thought, hang on, is that the one I’m thinking of, oh. Too late!’ He chuckles a merry, if slightly nerdy, chuckle.
Yorke laughs often these days. He’s also taken to spending large chunks of the band’s live shows dancing, like Mr Bean doing a manic morris dance. In Toronto, he even had the crowd guffawing when he goofed around, pulling silly faces to a piano-mounted camera linked to giant video screens. After years of inner turmoil, it seems Thom Yorke has finally learned to love being Radiohead’s frontman.
‘I forced myself,’ he admits. ‘When we booked the tour it was like, well I’m gonna have to get my head round this now.’
And he has. Although Yorke rightly points out that the soulless SkyDome arena didn’t offer the best atmosphere of the tour, he threw himself into the performance as much as he had at the two powerful Radiohead shows I’d already seen this year, at Shepherds Bush Empire and Glastonbury.
You only have to hear Yorke discuss the arena shows around 1997’s ‘OK Computer’ – the album that made Radiohead global stars and then, because of that success, almost broke them – to realise what a change this represents.
‘Those big gigs flicked with my head,’ says Yorke. ‘I’d be standing there for the whole show thinking, Why are we here? We don’t deserve to be here. What is this all about? It’s like a guilt thing. I’d stand there between songs for two or three minutes, not starting the next song and thinking, nope, don’t get it. I’d be waiting to understand but at the end of it not understanding and thinking, well. I’d better play a song now before someone starts throwing something.’ But you’ve got past that now? ‘Yeah, yeah. Think so. For now. There were a couple of close shaves, but I’m all right.’

Fitter happier
He’s not the only Radiohead member who’s found a ‘better headspace’. After Yorke’s interview, his place is taken on the bench, first by drummer Phil Selway (sharp. friendly), then by guitarist Jonny Greenwood (quiet, tired), before Jonny’s brother, bassist Colin Greenwood (bright, genial) and guitarist Ed O’Brien (tall, charming) sit together in the hotel restaurant.
All five members are intelligent, articulate men with distinct personalities, opinions and lives. But all five are clearly united in cherishing being part of Radiohead right now. ‘Oh God, and how,’ sighs Selway. ‘1 love every part of it,’ insists Jonny. ‘It’s fucking amazing,’ says O’Brien.
So what changed? How did the five individuals that Selway insists were all hit by the same stresses, strains and depressions as Yorke (‘but because he’s the frontman, he gets the focus of it’) this year come to not only release another amazing album and play some of their best shows, but to fall back in love with doing both of those things?
There are many reasons, and they differ depending on which member you ask. Yorke points to the conversations he bad with Michael Stipe andPolly Harvey that helped him to overcome his onstage guilt and realise a gig is just ‘a collective event that everyone has a stake in happening the right way’.
Jonny Greenwood tends towards the theory that the claustrophobic, intense and brutally honest ‘Kid A’ and ‘Amnesiac’ albums helped them to get the traumas of ‘OK Computer out of their system. Meanwhile, Selway speaks of the confidence they’ve found in what they do. ‘Ten years into being a signed band I just think we’ve reached a point where we feel that we can do it. I went through quite a number of years feeling quite fraudulent and questioning whether I could take myself seriously as a musician. But I’m there now. This is what I do.’
As for O’Brien and Colin Greenwood, they could theorise for England. O’Brien explains that avoiding long tours and packed promo schedules has probably stopped them selling as many records, but it’s had a positive impact on their personal lives and on their music. ‘As Woody Alien said, 80 per cent of success is just showing up. We’re not willing to do that now.’
And Colin explains that the band have learned to express their creative dissatisfaction without falling out. ‘Instead of it becoming a source of resentment and tension, it becomes a mature discussion about the future. And I think that’s really exciting.’ He also insists that Radiohead’s regular sweat lodges (a rough-and-ready Native American sauna) have played a big part. ‘A band that sweats together, stays together,’ he grins.
The one reason for their increased happiness that they all seem to agree on is perhaps the most surprising. Radiohead have level-headedly decided that their popularity has peaked, which, they say, has taken the pressure off. After the glitchy meanderings of ‘Kid A’ and ‘Amnesiac’, they thought this year’s comparatively song-based ‘Hail To The Thief’ would be received as a bona fide pop album. ‘Well, we tried,’ chuckles Yorke ruefully. O’Brien remembers talking to producer Nigel Godrich after finishing the album: ‘It was like, wow, this could rival “OK Computer”’.
It didn’t. ‘Hail To The Thief’ is a great album, but its skewed time signatures were still unconventional enough to scare away your average radio station or supermarket CD buyer. The album has sold around 200,000 copies in the UK – respectable, but by no means massive.
‘We were thinking we were still a viable Radio 1 band,’ says O’Brien. ‘Now we know where we are. So the music that will come next is wide open.’ ‘It’s like being released from the clutches,’ says Yorke.
There’s no doubt they still want plenty of people to hear their music – Yorke: ‘If we disappeared into the art world I’m not sure how excited I’d still be about it’ – but there just seems to be an inner calm that comes from not having to compete with your past achievements anymore.
And then there’s parenthood. Three of the band now have children. ‘Every friend I know who’s become a father has become a happier and better person and it’s no different with Thom, Phil and Jonny,’ says O’Brien.
Or, as Yorke puts it, ‘What happens is before you become a dad, people take you by the shoulder and tell you it’s gonna change your life. And you’re like, Oh really? But what they should be doing is grabbing the back of your head, pummelling it against a wall and telling you, “It’s! Gonna change! Your fucking life! Forever!”’
He rolls back laughing, but it’s clear he means it. (Later, as we walk back towards the hotel, Yorke spots his partner Rachel, who is visiting further up the pavement with two-year-old Noah. ‘That’s my son!’ he exclaims, breaking into a run. Noah does the same – ‘Daddy!’ – and when they meet, Yorke barrels the child up into his proud arms.)

Everything in its right place
Which isn’t to say that EVERYTHING Radiohead’s world has turned a Hollywood shade of rosiness. This, after all. is the same band whose frontman told Oxford’s Curfew Magazine in November 1991 that ‘people sometimes say we take things too seriously’. And that was his first ever interview, ‘Ha!’ says Yorke now, ‘already worrying about what think! ‘Portent,’ chuckles Selway. ‘The difference now is that we take the important things seriously, not everylhing thrown at us.’
So, while Yorke still has ‘frequent bad head spaces’, he’s learned to deal with them better. And although Radiohead are still five abnormally well-read, politically aware and, above all, creatively driven musicians, they’ve made room for other things in their lives. York hitchhiked a portable studio around on tour. ‘But I’d get it into my room and set it up and think, I can’t be arsed! I’d rather just range around on days off. Or sleep.’
That more relaxed attitude has even led to a sometime inclusion of ‘Creep’ on their nightly-changing setlist. The song that broke Radiohead in the US, it had become a millstone around their necks. ‘We’ve just got back into it,’ says Yorke, ‘We’ve been throwing it into the middle of the set at a few shows, like it’s no big deal.’
‘It’s like Cantona coming back for United,’ offers O’Brien, Radiohead’s resident fan. ‘You’ve got your Roy Keanes, the ones you put in every game. But you’d just bring Cantona out a few times a season.’
And so Radiohead arrive in London for a week’s Earls Court shows feeling refreshed and reinvigorated. At one with their past, enjoying their present and excited about their future. [?] years in, Yorke can certainly imagine Radiohead still doing what they do in 2013.
‘If it still gives me the horn, then definitely.’
Does that mean it gives you the horn still, then? ‘Yeah,’ he nods.
Looking across at him on the bench, visions of Yorke grinding against his microphone seem to fill both our heads. ‘I mean, not literally,’ he backtracks quickly, collapsing into giggles that send the Central Park squirrels scurrying. ‘Imagine that!’ he gasps. ‘Yeah baby!’

Radiohead play Earls Court on November 26-27