Set List: (Fitter Happier)/ Lucky/ Bones/ Airbag/ My Iron Lung/ Exit Music/ You/ Karma Police/ Talk Show Host/ Fake Plastic Trees/ Paranoid Android/ Planet Telex/ Climbing Up The Walls/ No Surprises/ The Bends/ Just/ High And Dry/ Electioneering/ Street Spirit/ Nice Dream/ The Tourist/ Black Star

For the European launch of their brilliant but peculiar third LP, OK Computer, Radiohead have opted to take it reasonably easy, hang out in one of the continent's most beautiful cities for a week and play two shows. This first is absolutely stunning.

As he returns to the stage for a second encore, after a rabid seven-minute ovation, Thom Yorke breaks into a wonky grin and tells the delighted crowd, "This is the most fucking nervous we 've been for two years." Then he breaks into Nice Dream, perhaps the most moving melody on The Bends, and your reporter is quickly blinking 'em back. It feels like the climax to a Hollywood showbiz weepy, a moment of vindication, the moment when Radiohead ascend into the realm of the greats.

There 's an earlier suggestion of this following Fake Plastic Trees. The crowd applaud. Thom thanks them. Then a spontaneous, thunderous, second wave of approval explodes from the audience. It says, "We're not just cheering you English guys because it's our role, we 've been touched, we love you."

It's a young crowd. The bar 's open but hardly anyone is drinking, instead they smoke like power stations and, during My Iron Lung - the only chance for rockin' action the Spanish kids get in tonight 's moody, Creep-less set - they pogo energetically. For a few minutes it 's like feeding time in a kangaroo farm. Otherwise, they remain rapt for the new material: the spectral Exit Music, the edgy Talk Show Host, the cacophonous Climbing Up The Walls, the chillingly lovely No Surprises, Jonny Greenwood 's dreamy hymn The Tourist.

The band, perhaps forced apart by their intense concentration, barely connect on-stage. They 're five guys in their own worlds: Yorke singing angelically and playing guitar; Ed O' Brien wrestling riffs, shaking a cabassa or singing backing vocals through cupped hands; drummer Phil Selway and bassist Colin Greenwood interacting a little but mainly keeping their heads down and getting as much out of their instruments as possible.

Only Jonny - a chronic upstager - makes a point of leaving his post. Wearing a surgical wrist splint to ease RSI, he slashes merry hell out of several guitars, using them as effects generators as much as conduits for a melody. Sometimes he 'll unleash a particularly wayward sound and have to tear across the stage after it. Either that or he 's constantly fiddling with various stage-level devices that require him to bend in two and suddenly pop up into the spotlight just as Thom 's coming to a good bit. When the guitars have been discarded, he can make a meal out of even the simplest keyboard part, apparently using his entire, rangy body - from toe to bony finger - to depress a single note. He even steals our attention when he 's not there. On one occasion, we hear an electric piano being cuffed but can 't see who 's responsible. A dim spotlight slowly comes on at the rear of the stage and Jonny 's revealed, giving it the full Phantom Of The Opera and flinging his lustrous bangs about. Most touching of all is the moment when a burly roadie delivers a small item on a stand to his corner. It 's a glockenspiel. And Jonny proceeds to attack it like he 's Paganini Emmerson, dark prince of tinkly things.

But mostly, tonight 's show is about Thom 's unique and expressive voice, the deeply affecting melodies he brings it to, and the stirring arrangements his band create around them. After many years of puny-voiced indie twits fronting under-ambitious music, it 's a blast, and a reaffirmation of what makes pop so life-enhancing, to find a group so willing, so able to explore fresh terrain and to watch them mine so rich a seam. Oasis may be the current kings of planet goodtime but Radiohead are in another dimension, emperors of their own beautiful universe.
In other words, genius on toast.

-Jim Irvin

Mojo
07.97