Tuned to Their Own Frequency

So does Thom Yorke of Radiohead have his Grammy acceptance speech already written?

“Oh, yeah,” Yorke says, smiling mischievously. “I’d like to thank . . . “ His voice trails off, but the smile remains.

Well no, Yorke admits, the British rock band won’t be in New York on Wednesday for the Grammy Awards, even though its “OK Computer” is nominated for album of the year.

He appreciates the nomination (and a second for best alternative music recording), but he doesn’t feel the group would fit in amid all the “tuxedos and self-congratulation” of the evening, and they don’t want to end up making some ill-timed remarks a la Eddie Vedder, who ended up dismissing the Grammys when the band accepted an award in the 1996 telecast.

For fans of the fiercely uncompromising, relatively low-profile band, the surprise isn’t that the group will skip the ceremonies, but that Yorke actually can smile.

Partially because of Radiohead’s first U.S. hit, a shattering 1993 dose of self-loathing titled “Creep,” Yorke has a reputation, in his own words, of being a “miserable bastard.”

On stage, the 29-year-old sings mostly about psychological struggles with such primal urgency that he all but defies you to take your eyes off him. The raw intensity reminds you in the often overly theatrical world of pop-rock that there’s nothing more riveting than simply unbridled passion.

This passion, also reflected in the rest of the quintet, has placed Radiohead as a prominent member of a new generation of rewarding British bands--also including Oasis, the Verve and Prodigy--that have rekindled an interest in British rock in America.

Those four bands alone sold more than $250 million worth of albums around the world in 1997, and they dominated year-end critics’ polls on both sides of the Atlantic. In a rare show of agreement, both Rolling Stone and Spin named Radiohead the best group of the year. Rolling Stone also declared the Verve’s “Bitter Sweet Symphony” the single of the year.

One major reason for the British upsurge is Radiohead, a band that surrounds Yorke’s frequently brooding or questioning lyrics with timeless and sophisticated musical textures that recall the artful ambition and range of Pink Floyd or the late-period Beatles.

In fact, industry insiders hold Radiohead in such respect that many believe the group has a chance of reaching the critical and commercial plateau of a U2 or R.E.M.

“I get a little nervous about things like awards and sales,” Yorke says during the interview. “Part of me wonders if all that makes it harder for you to focus on what you should be doing as artists.

“I admire the way people like the Velvet Underground [who never sold many records] could make music with such conviction, but I wonder whether they would have been able to stick to their values if they had suddenly sold millions of records.

“There are lots of dangers in rock. . . . The lifestyle, the business issues, but the biggest danger is ego and how that can alter the kind of music that you make.”

Yorke’s persona is so intense on stage and his lyrics sometimes so dark that you wouldn’t be surprised for him to be equally unrelenting during an interview, possibly preferring a darkened corner in a restaurant here, where the shadows would hide all the telltale expressions.

But Yorke proves disarmingly open, picking a well-lighted table near the restaurant bar. He orders a beer and a plate of vegetable tempura, and he reveals far more than a smile when asked about his classic performance last summer at KROQ-FM’s Weenie Roast concert at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre.

He cackles so loudly over the memory of the band’s appearance that the bartender looks over to make sure everything is all right.

It’s always difficult for a band with ideas to catch an audience’s attention in the glare of the afternoon sun, but doubly so on a Weenie Roast bill that was peppered with such party-minded acts as Reel Big Fish and the Mighty Mighty Bosstones.

After one particularly moody tune, Yorke looked out at the restless, inattentive crowd and said something along the lines of, “Well, here’s another song that you’re going to hate.”

About the moment, Yorke says, “As soon as we got to the venue, I was thinking, ‘Why did we ever agree to do this? Nothing is worth this.’ So finally, I decided to have some fun.

“There were all these people out there eating popcorn and throwing beach balls in the air, so I said what I was sure was running through their heads. I thought we ought to all acknowledge what was happening.”

Chris Hufford, who co-manages the band, said Radiohead has shown that same intensity from the beginning.

“They’ve always taken what they do very seriously,” he says. “With a lot of bands, there may be the fashion thing or seeing who can be the most outspoken in the pop papers or take the most drugs, but with Radiohead it was always the music. That’s why they remain in Oxford rather than move to London. They don’t want to be distracted.”

For anyone who knows the history of British rock in the ‘60s, when the Beatles and the Rolling Stones set the tone for pop around the world, it’s hard to imagine how bankrupt British rock seemed in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s--at least from an American perspective.

One reason U.S. rock fans gave up on British pop is that so many of the British bands of the ‘80s, including Spandau Ballet and A Flock of Seagulls, were so vacuous.

At the same time, the few quality bands that did emerge in Britain, including the Stone Roses, no longer seemed challenged by the idea of “breaking” America, the way their predecessors had. They didn’t want to spend months playing clubs to build a following in the U.S., when they could draw huge crowds at home and concentrate on other places in Europe.

So, communications broke down.

Virgin Records executive David Boyd, who signed the Verve to that label, also thinks the creative climate in England was hurt in the early ‘90s by conservative radio programming practices, which in turn led record companies to sign bands that could produce instant hits but which had little long-range potential. The result was a gradual decline in interest in new bands.

The turnabout was the breakthrough of Oasis in 1994. Here was a band that wrote captivating songs that radio couldn’t ignore and a band that had the career ambition to work hard, both in England and in the U.S.

“Oasis opened the door to the English record-buying public again,” Boyd said. “It was amazing. I remember going down to a pub in the financial district one night and there were guys in suits singing [Oasis’] ‘Wonderwall,’ and then I’d go to someone’s house and there was kids singing the same song.

“People rediscovered music here through Oasis and then they started asking what else could they listen to . . . and the trail led to the Verve and Radiohead and the other bands. They forced radio to open up the programming . . . to play more quality music.”

Alan McGee, whose Creation Records is the home base here for Oasis, thinks there was also a sociocultural component at work in the resurgence of British rock.

“Socially, I think Britain was on its knees in the ‘80s,” he says. “Young people were shoved down and down, and told they had no future, and they eventually decided to fight back.

“You had a lot of bands formed by people who had absolutely no other chance of [bettering themselves]. They started making music that expressed their hopes and dreams, songs like Oasis’ ‘Live Forever,’ and young people responded.

“I think you find the same kind of energy and creativity in fashion and art and other aspects of life in Britain again. It’s like the excitement of the ‘60s all over again.”

The irony about Radiohead’s place in the current hierarchy of outstanding British bands is that the quintet was one of the groups that many U.S. critics would have pointed to five years ago as an example of why British rock was then trailing U.S. rock.

“Creep,” the 1993 single, was an undeniably catchy radio tune, but it seemed calculated. Unlike the ragged alienation of Nirvana or Soundgarden, “Creep” expressed inner doubts with a slickness that suggested some studio pros trying to capitalize on the youthful anger that was fueling the record business at the time.

Yorke felt the backlash and, to a degree, even understood it. He never meant “Creep,” which appeared on Radiohead’s 1992 debut album, “Pablo Honey,” to be a signature tune for the band. In fact, he wrote it, in part, as a joke.

“I was drunk and feeling sorry for myself,” he says of the night he wrote the hit. “It was meant to be an exaggeration, a bit of melodrama, even kind of humorous.”

Rather than sing it in that spirit in the studio, however, Yorke somehow identified with the feelings of insecurity in the song, and he sang it straight. The problem was that young rock fans identified with it and expected Yorke to deliver it on stage with the same, soul-baring force night after night.

Eventually, Yorke channeled some of the confusion of the time into the songs for the follow-up album, “The Bends.” In “My Iron Lung,” he even described the band as feeling trapped by its image and tour demands the same way someone might feel restricted to a hospital respirator.

“The Bends” was a knockout of an album that combined all sorts of exquisite musical textures with songs of genuine feeling about longing and need. And it slowly began to eat away at the early skepticism.

One thing the album and subsequent shows demonstrated was that Radiohead was far more than a one-man show. The rest of the group--guitarists Jonny Greenwood and Ed O’Brien, bassist Colin Greenwood and drummer Phil Selway--brought an intelligence and style to the music that separated the band from most of its contemporaries.

“OK Computer,” the group’s third album, hit the rock world with a bang last year, selling 3 1/2 million copies worldwide and earning the Grammy nominations. In England, it turned Yorke into a bona fide star.

And U.S. pop fans can forgive themselves if they took awhile to be convinced by Radiohead. Even in England, the pop press seemed especially slow to recognize the group’s importance.

“They weren’t embraced by the press [in England] because they weren’t as flamboyant as some of the other bands are here,” says Keith Wozencroft, head of A&R; for Parlophone Records in England, which releases Radiohead’s music. “It was frustrating at the time, but it was probably best in the long run because it gave the band a chance to develop naturally.”

Because of “Creep” and the general tone of Radiohead’s stark performances, there is a tendency in the British press to portray Yorke as someone who was scarred by a tortured childhood.

And he did go through a traumatic period because he was born with his left eye paralyzed. By the time he was in grade school, he had gone through a series of operations. At one point, he had to wear a patch over the eye for almost a year, and kids taunted him with cruel nicknames. Even today, he has only partial sight in the eye.

Yet Yorke downplays the troubled childhood angle of his story. “Too often people end up using what happens as an excuse not to overcome problems,” he says.

Like R.E.M., whose Michael Stipe is a close friend of Yorke’s, Radiohead was formed by friends in a college town. The group, which took its name from the title of a Talking Heads song, was signed by Parlophone in 1991.

As he sits in the restaurant, Yorke, who lives in Oxford with his girlfriend, says the last seven years have been wonderful but draining. After a brief U.S. tour that will include a stop April 1 at Universal Amphitheatre, Radiohead will take a three-month break, after which the band may begin work on its fourth album.

The expectations will be immense.

“Few bands in a generation set new standards in a ways that inspire a lot of other musicians to follow, but I think Radiohead is one,” says Gary Gersh, president and CEO of the band’s U.S. label, Capitol. “When they played New York, there must have been 75 to 100 artists standing next to me, and Radiohead just blew everyone away . . . I’m talking Courtney Love to Missy Elliott.”

“Radiohead takes elements that are very familiar and moves them forward in a way that is beyond 1998 already . . . not just an update, but something that is totally new,” says R.E.M.’s Stipe. “It’s inspiring not only to anyone who listens to music, but anyone who tries to create music themselves.”

Yorke knows that some people think Radiohead is a bit too serious. It’s the same complaint that frequently was lodged about U2 before the Irish band started showing its raucous side in the “Achtung Baby” album and tour.

But he doesn’t see his music as unduly dark.

“I think I’ve got quite a thick skin, but it is upsetting to have people keep writing about you like you are someone who hates life or only wants to look at the problems,” he says, finishing a second beer. “It makes you want to ask, ‘Oh, sorry, is there some sort of happy club that I should be part of?’

“If you take a band like the Velvet Underground again, I never really got the feeling that they were miserable people or they were going out of their way to write about life’s difficulties. I just saw them as addressing the issues that trouble and confuse people--and I’d like to think that’s also what we are doing.”

“Thom has a reputation of being this down-in-the-mouth, depressed young fellow, but the truth is he has a great sense of humor and is very intelligent,” Stipe says. “He just has the ability to tap into this [darkness] that is so very common and so human, and he works that through his music and words in ways that are illuminating.”

Meanwhile, the British pop community is celebrating Radiohead’s Grammy nominations--as well as nominations for Prodigy and the Chemical Brothers, which are also up for an award in the best alternative music performance.

“For years before Oasis, I used to walk into American record companies and they used to just laugh at the idea of British music holding any interest in the U.S.,” says Creation’s McGee. “Now, they send limos to pick you up at the airport.”