So. This is the greatest rock band in the universe. General consensus indicates no less. Spin magazine. Rolling Stone. Time magazine.

Time magazine?

That last one is particularly telling of a band that uses daring experimentation to wrap an entire corps of music critics around its little finger while still giving the masses enough to chew on that they buy its records by the truckload.

It hasn't been done often and it's almost never been done well. Mass-marketable music (read: Britney and clones) generally exists in a parallel and opposite dimension from critically precious pop created by avant gardistes such as these five lads from Oxford.

But such is the Radiohead paradox: the frontman, Thom Yorke, said in an interview last year he was "bored of the whole rock thing." Then they went out and produced Kid A, a dark, shoe-gazing meander along the border between pop, synth and progressive rock, followed it with the equally esoteric Amnesiac half a year later, and then turned up at Molson Park in Barrie on Friday with all the swagger and strut of the peak-era Rolling Stones. What do you do with that?

You do what the adoring throng of fans, 25,000 strong, did: Grab yourself a patch of grass and drink it in. From the thudding urgency of 'The National Anthem', a bass-heavy assault from Kid A that opened the show, to quieter moments like OK Computer's 'No Surprises' and 'Exit Music', Radiohead demonstrated they were in complete control of the crowd, of their material and of themselves.

Yorke, by reputation a stage-shy introvert, struck more rock-star poses in the show's main set than a Led Zeppelin cover band, bounding from one end of the stage to the other and wielding his guitar like a religious artifact the natives had come to praise.

At one point, playing Amnesiac's 'You and Whose Army?' at a piano with his back to the stage, Yorke found himself face-to-face with a fish-eye lens that beamed him back to the crowd via a twin set of gigantic TV screens. Distorted to caricature-like proportions, Yorke good-naturedly gave the crowd a series of extreme close-ups with more face contortions than Jerry Lewis. Stage-shy introvert? Hello, rock star.

Drop the showmanship, though, drop the TV screens and the silvery stage set with captivatingly choreographed symphonies of light, and what's left is a band in full command of its craft.

'The National Anthem''s signature bass was in full attack mode, but the song, which could easily have lain tedious and lifeless on the live concert stage, morphed into a killer opener, infused with staccato beats and rhythms and stripped of the pseudo-arty horn section that anchored it on the album. What was left was the song at its most raw, an internalized experiment transformed into an old-school rock anthem for the live stage.

It was really a testing ground for Amnesiac, too, the band's coolly received most recent effort (coolly received by the critics, that is, for the first time in the band's glittering career).

Under the summer skies at Molson Park, though, the band cleared away any lingering doubts. 'Packt Like Sardines in a Crushed Tin Box', which on the album sounds like Thom Yorke fronting the German proto-synth band Kraftwerk, was stripped to a near-punk urgency - a shock and welcome surprise.

'Knives Out', the nearest thing to a melodic pop ballad on Amnesiac, was testament to the band's almost unmatchable skill at performing ballads. It was also a reminder that Yorke's voice, one of the richest, most expressive sopranos in pop music, can still carry all the weight of disappointment and despair it ever did, from songs such as 'Fake Plastic Trees' or 'Bulletproof' (from The Bends album), all the way to this, the latest instalment in the canon of the Greatest Rock Band in the Universe.

Those looking for the misstep that might topple them from their pedestal will have to renew the search. For Radiohead, even a slight stumble is just another chance to reach a little higher and grip their title a little harder.

Murray Whyte