Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke once called bass player Colin Greenwood the band's secret weapon, as in the one who will chat to anyone, any time.

It's not very flattering, really, responds Greenwood on the phone this week from Boston, where Radiohead launched the first date of its North American tour in support of its outstanding sixth album, Hail to the Thief. The tour brings Radiohead to Thunderbird Stadium Saturday.

What he's referring to is when Thom wants to get off and have an early night and doesn't want to talk with anyone, then he deploys me.

It doesn't take long to realize why. You get the feeling Greenwood, a bookish type with a degree in literature, a knack for dressing frumpy and a famously huge appetite, would prefer to chirp and blather on about anything other than the subject of Radiohead. He's like the amiable and gentile British pastor, oblivious to the hard realities of life, so self-effacing and coy it's almost irritating, and just a little bit cuckoo.

For example, he'll happily tell you, in his sing-songy private-school-boy accent: I just got back from having seafood with my brother and we had lobster. It was lovely.

During another recent interview with The Vancouver Sun, he was prone to exclaiming, Yaay, and weee as an expression of positivity for no apparent reason.

It makes for a pleasant enough interview, similar to having tea with Granny, who's mixed her medications. And besides, you think to yourself, you could be talking to Yorke on one of his bad days, when he's feeling sulky and precious, and hot-ass ready to take issue with the most innocuous of questions.

Greenwood, on the other hand, simply raises your suspicion that his twittering is a ploy to fend off anything controversial, which is most probably the case, since his answers to serious questions often sound stiff and rehearsed. Radiohead has said it is making every effort to avoid Clear Channel owned venues this time around, to circumvent the monopoly claimed by the concert behemoth.

What we're trying to do is strike a balance between providing music and entertainment between people who want to come and see it without excluding audiences or places and trying to work as independently as possible at the same time, he rattles off.

Q: Much of Hail To The Thief comes from the perspective of a new parent concerned about the kind of world he's bringing his child into. Are you more or less optimistic about the planet since your son's birth?

A: As I'm prone to depression, I'm very suspicious of my panic attacks and the way they make me feel about the future. It's a common delusion that depressed people have about how bad the world will be. But it's kind of difficult not to be. In England, we've been going through this heat wave, and I've been waking up every morning at 4 o'clock having panic attacks about it. People are dying of heat exhaustion. The problem is that the elite, whoever the hell they are, are deciding global policies on the environment, and they have no concept about the future at all, what the consequences will be. They're supposed to be answerable to the people who put them in power, but they're not, because the evidence is all around us. When we were making the record, I used to sit around thinking that it can't carry on like this. It just can't.

Q: That would explain the anxiety and paranoia in the music.

A: This isn't something that is with me all the time. I think about this as much as most parents do, I suppose. I just choose to put it all in the music, because I don't want to get locked up (laughs).

I was in so many dance record shops, seeing people listen to two seconds of all these records and then choosing them on that basis, he said, recalling the time prior to Radiohead's North American tour, which has a date at Red Rocks Amphitheatre on Tuesday night.

That started to get to me, judging five minutes of music on the quality of the sound and the rhythm that's in them. I found myself doing it, walking up to the turntable and plowing through a pile of vinyl.

I started to get the fear that Radiohead was just going to go down the route of generating new sounds for the sake of it, and thereby lose something musical. Most of my favorite records are full of new sounds that you've never heard before, but there are some really bad records like that. It's like anything else. You can make a truly original film that's unwatchable rubbish. It's in music as well, but it can be harder to spot.

Christ, you can actually see Thom Yorke's head thrashing around as you listen to this track.

Selected because it's one of the few from Hail To The Thief that recalls the fondly remembered Radiohead of yore rather than the moody, laptop-hunched Radiohead of The Gloaming, Go To Sleep even finds space to throw some distinctly Bends-era guitar shapes at the close.

A good excuse, then, to release some outtakes that never made it past the commercial brains at Parlophone.

Disc 1 features I Am Citizen Insane, a track that still shows Radiohead's conception of electronic music to be indebted to Boards Of Canada but with some of the digi-funkiness of early Autechre thrown in for good measure.

Disc 2 eschews innovation for the Brit-folkie strum of Gagging Order and the brilliant Cream-esque blues menace of I Am A Wicked Child. Proof, if it were needed, of a band currently operating with creativity to spare.

9/10, James Poletti

Due to the power outages and the state of emergency that has been declared by the premier of Ontario, Radiohead's sold out performance at the Molson Amphitheatre in Toronto this Saturday, Auguts 16th has been postponed until further notice. Ticket holders are encouraged to keep their tickets until a rescheduled date can be confirmed. We will update the status of the rescheduled date within the next week to ten days. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused ticket holders.

July 5
Up at 8:30. Can’t sleep, too many things in my head that I need to remember to do before we leave—soft case for the 12-string so we can carry it on the plane, find a hot-weather shirt or two (almost everything I have is black...), shampoo, a new shoulder bag, pack our bags...

July 7
Flights went fine and the first show went well, I guess. Bergamo is a medium sized city just a bit away from Milan. After their soundcheck, the Radiohead guys one-by-one came over and greeted us. Nice guys. Even their crew was very nice and accommodating. Doors opened while we were still soundchecking our last song and the main gate was directly across at the back of the courtyard. I think the vision of the first 20 or 30 people dashing toward stage while we were playing was more unsettling than seeing the whole crowd later when we finally went on for real.

July 8
The drive was longer than expected today. We did a quick check, finishing again just as the first anxious audience members came through the gate. I think I heard a few of them shouting “Santa Maria” as they sat down on the pavement in front of the stage. Are they thanking the patron saint of good seats?

With the first show jitters gone, we were a little more relaxed. We’re still feeling our way around the large stage dynamic. Louder songs of course go over better and we’re kinda letting ourselves do that for a change, just to see how we feel.

Chatted a bit more with the Radiohead guys. Being an equipment geek, I’ve been nosing around at their stuff. They are an interesting and varied bunch, technology-wise. For instance, while Johnny plays some stuff using effects on a laptop and expensive hand-built analog modular synth filters, he also gets his famous crunchy guitar sound from a small solid-state practice amp—yes, the world famous “KA-CHUNK” on “Creep” can be yours at the local pawn shop, not the fancy expensive equipment boutique.

Frankfurt (Messehalle) - 20.1.2004
Dortmund (Westfalenhalle) - 21.1.2004
Hamburg (Color-Line Arena) - 22.1.2004
Dresden (Messehalle1) - 25.1.2004
Berlin (Max-Schmeling-Halle) - 26.1.2004