Radiohead singer Thom Yorke can tell you exactly when and where he hit rock-bottom: November 19th, 1997, the moment he walked offstage after a concert at the NEC Arena in Birmingham, England.

Yorke, guitarist Ed O'Brien, drummer Phil Selway, bassist Colin Greenwood and guitarist Jonny Greenwood, Colin's younger brother, had been touring Europe and America for seven months on behalf of their third album, OK Computer. They had five months to go. But Yorke was already toast — exhausted by the explosive neurosis of his performances, gagging on the backstage circus of plastic love and promo.

"I came off at the end of that show," he remembers, "sat in the dressing room and couldn't speak. I actually couldn't speak. People were saying, 'You all right?' I knew people were speaking to me. But I couldn't hear them. And I couldn't talk. I'd just so had enough. And I was bored with saying I'd had enough. I was beyond that.

"You can fall very easily into the mind-set of being the victim," admits Yorke, 32, talking over the roar of lunch-hour traffic at an outdoor cafe in Radiohead's hometown of Oxford. "It only takes a few times for you to give into things that you shouldn't have. The easiest thing to do is resent it.

"And I was incredibly good at being the victim. You can abdicate responsibility, fuck things up whenever you choose and not have to explain yourself."

He then cites a line from "Everything in Its Right Place," the quietly tortured opener of Radiohead's fourth album, Kid A: "Yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon." "Lots of people say that song is gibberish," Yorke says irritably. "It's not. It's totally about that" — the mute, vengeful paralysis he felt in Birmingham, which stayed with Yorke deep into the strange, simultaneous recording of Radiohead's twin hits, Kid A and the just-released Amnesiac.

In England, Yorke explains, "sucking a lemon" refers to "the face you pull because a lemon is so tart." He twists his sharp features into a ferocious grimace.

"That's the face I had for three years."

Those three years are up. Radiohead, the most inventive British rock group of the last decade, are now one of the most successful and uncompromising bands in the world.

"What they have done seems to be very clear and smart," says R.E.M. singer Michael Stipe, an avowed Radiohead fan and close friend of Yorke's since the two groups toured together in 1995. "Which is, with the number of hits they've had, they are simply staking their claim as their own band, making music they want to make — no one's lapdogs, whether it's an audience, a record company or their peers.

"And fucking kudos for that," Stipe raves. "It's not easy to listen only to yourself and to react accordingly."

Radiohead were poised for greatness all through the 1990s. "Creep," Yorke's scathingly funny song about self-loathing on the 1993 album Pablo Honey, established the band as modern-rock radio stars. The futurist nerve and vintage guitar drama of 1995's The Bends and the '97 million-seller OK Computer put Radiohead in a direct line of succession to the Beatles, Pink Floyd and U2 as classic-rock gods, a band that mattered with sales to match.