IF YOU’RE going to do the hippy chick thing, you may as well do it properly. So I’ve been concentrating on my homework. Tomorrow we leave for Glastonbury, and what with Radiohead topping the bill on Saturday night, I thought I’d better familiarise myself first with their new album.

It’s funny how we make the same mistake again and again and fail to learn, isn’t it? In this case it was a combination of open-mindedness and naive optimism that led me to believe that, just because I hated Radiohead’s supposedly seminal OK Computer (voted the best album ever by readers of Q magazine) didn’t mean that I would also dislike the new Hail to the Thief. Perhaps the band would have changed their musical style in six years.

Perhaps I simply had to apply myself harder to the music.

It was the same mindset that made me sit through accumulated weeks of westerns, sci-fi and slasher movies when I was younger, because other people had assured me that they were so good. When I didn’t enjoy them, I assumed that it was my fault. If only I gave them another chance, perhaps I would see the point of them. So I would watch another, and another, and still find myself bored by the westerns, scared stiff by the slashers or completely bemused by the sci-fi.

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

Not until I was well into my twenties did I realise that some categories of movie simply weren’t for me. It didn’t mean that they weren’t good of their genre. I could watch the best Clint Eastwood spaghetti western and still find it tiresome (men punching each other in bars or galloping around raising dust, and women doing nothing at all). I could watch a “brilliant” thriller in which a young woman was stalked by a psychopath which would succeed only in terrifying me at the time and haunting me for weeks afterwards. As for sci-fi, I just never got it.

Anyway, I reckon I have the same category problem with Radiohead. Their music belongs to a genre that we used to call “suicide music” when we were students. Then it was played by bands with such gloriously inapt names as Joy Division and the Cure (cure for what? Terminal cheerfulness?). They were successors to the likes of Leonard Cohen and Lou Reed.

Suicide music needs only a whining voice, depressing lyrics and a dirge-like drum and bass line. Thom Yorke of Radiohead has it to perfection: if he were to sing The Sun Has Got His Hat On, it would sound like a lament for global warming. The lyrics on Hail to the Thief include lines such as, “It’s the Devil’s way now/There is no way out/ You can scream and you can shout/ It is too late now” and “Walk into the jaws of Hell. Anytime.

Anytime. We can wipe you out.” (That’s just the first two songs.) In a recent interview with Spin magazine, Yorke admitted that, at the time of writing, “I was just overcome by all this fear and darkness”.

At university I shared a house with a boy who adored suicide music. His happiest moments were spent locked in his room with Joy Division. The rest of us just heard the “boom, boom, boom” through our ceilings and drowned it out with much more uplifting reggae, rap or ska. Joy Division doesn’t make you want to dance; it makes you want to slit your wrists.

I guess it’s partly a boy thing. This is the sort of music that speaks directly to the angst of male teenagedom. Looking at the Radiohead message board on the net, most of those posted seem to be from boys or men. Not that adolescent girls don’t get depressed, too — but they seek other outlets for their misery, usually broken-heart ballads sung by women with marvellous voices.

Sad music can, after all, be ineffably beautiful. All my favourite classical music is in the minor key, and much of it comes from requiems. But nothing in Mozart’s Requiem is dirge-like. It is dramatic, soaring, poignant but never droning or whining. The same could be said of k. d. lang.

It’s not that Radiohead are bad. How could they be, when all but one of their albums has gone platinum, even though their music is thoughtful, original and admirably free from commercialism? They haven’t sold out and they deplore the cult of celebrity. They are clearly an intelligent bunch of men; but they just don’t touch my chord.

I know that I’ll return from Glastonbury to a black screenful of e-mails from irate Radiohead fans telling me it’s my fault that I don’t like the best band in the universe. At least I’ll be able to say that I gave them not just a second but a third chance, too.

For I always seem to make the same mistake, in the insane hope that this time things will be different. I don’t doubt I’ll go to watch the band on Saturday night regardless. You see, everyone tells me they’re fantastic live.

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