This was always going to be an evening of incongruities. Radiohead, legendary champions of the pale, the fey and the bullied, going head-to-head with a football match which had epic written all over it the minute Celtic qualified. Would our god-of-the-waifs Thom Yorke supply us with a score and results service? Given that the big boys who picked on him when he was a lad probably liked football as much as they did picking on skinny ginger kids, it was unlikely. All elbows, knees and awkwardness, Yorke’s very physique is an affront to the sportsman.

The astonishing career trajectory of Radiohead can be explained by Yorke’s attempt to escape this simplistic picture of the rock star as childhood victim.

If the cartoon alienation of Creep hadn’t been such a stonking hit, the band would not have been forced to rise as far as they have above it. Yet although they managed, you still get a glimpse of Yorke the troubled weirdo, wrapped in his scarf, passing the sports field with a withering look in his eyes.

He gives us strict instructions on when to clap for Where I End and You Begin or, he suggests in a prim manner we can “all go and watch the game”. It is left to guitarist Ed O’Brien to give us an occasional update, because, so he claims, he “knows about football”.

Radiohead make Mercury shortlist

Radiohead competes with The Last Shadow Puppets, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss and Estelle for the prestigious prize

Background

• Radiohead at the Empress Ballroom

• Radiohead at Olympia, Dublin

• Radiohead at Edinburgh Corn Exchange

• It's not that Radiohead are bad...

• Radiohead: Hail to the Thief

Radiohead at MEN Arena, Manchester

For a band sometimes dismissed as sour-faced boffins, Radiohead still know how to mount an explosively exciting show

Maybe so, but that seems to be where the populism ends. Radiohead are a bunch of hideously posh arty types who love awkward, difficult music. In April 2002, when they were about to enter the studio to record Hail to the Thief (now ready for official release but bootlegged everywhere), O’Brien predicted it would be “pretty self-indulgent”. On the strength of a slow and occasionally ponderous middle section of the gig in which the most noodle-some of Hail to the Thief is showcased, O’Brien must be considering the album a mission accomplished.

From the frankly dull Sail to the Moon through to the marginally more interesting We Suck Young Blood, there is much artistry, but little interest. Yorke, the elder Jonny Greenwood and O’Brien are still pilfering textures from the world of electronica, and as a result have lost a significant amount of the rage that their grunge heritage gave them.

For a sagging half an hour you wonder why it is that the posher the band, the longer the songs have to be. Punk was for proles so the tunes were short. Prog rock is made by toffs for toffs so it follows that every tune must feature a couple of key changes, a long interminable slow bit capped by an extended wig-out. Maybe the length of the song is directly proportionate to life expectancy.

And yet — there has always been an “and yet” with Radiohead — they are streets ahead of their peers in terms of sheer musicianship and the effortless class of composition, both of the individual tracks and the way they put together a set list. For although the evening had its pedestrian passages, they were strung out quite deliberately between moments of unalloyed brilliance; Yorke’s biblical falsetto intro to the Pyramid Song giving way to drummer Phil Selway’s soft jazz shuffle, the sinister Subterranean Homesick Blues of Wolf at the Door (never heard live before) and, my word, that quite ridiculously moving hymn of alienation, Karma Police, which brought the evening to a majestic close.

What makes Radiohead such a great band — if not the greatest around today — is their balance; the manner in which they play off their own potentially alienating search for artistic freedom with an acceptance that if they want a large audience, they need to provide tunes for us to sing and simple ideas for us to get our heads round. “You want me? F***ing well come and find me . . . I will be waiting with a gun and a pack of sandwiches” sings Yorke on Talk Show Host; threatening and pathetic at the same time; sitting in a position of power but consistently under threat.

Ultimately the self-indulgence of certain sections of Hail to the Thief makes their current poise seem all the more admirable, given that it is so clearly under threat from the sheer weight of collective ambition that this band have for their music.

Yet Radiohead are currently like David Bowie at the height of his powers. The Thin White Duke had a sixth sense for knowing how pretentious you could be in pop music before you needed to back off or add a calming moment of humour. Radiohead are the same. Wolf at the Door and Hail are as gutsy and catchy as anything they’ve ever done while Yorke’s voice just seems to get better and better. Their future could well be as astonishing as their past. One just hopes that this future does not contain a double gatefold concept album.

Damon Albarn — having footballed his way out of a post-Parklife depression — once said that if Kurt Cobain had played five-a-side football he never would have topped himself. If ever the angst or the artiness should threaten to overwhelm you Thom, you could always give it a go.

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