THERE was a time when the best Radiohead shows were ill-tempered affairs, with Thom Yorke cursing the cosmos for committing some vague but atrocious crime against his sensitive soul. But having shed their rock-star skins to become an esoteric, quasi-electronic, art-jazz collective, the Oxford quintet seem far happier now dancing only to their own methodically scrambled tune. And this healthy sense of creative enjoyment, so evident at Glastonbury in June, was in the air again when the band began their latest UK tour at this sold-out Manchester concert.

Fresh from a string of European dates, Radiohead have been playing variations on this set since the spring and they have now honed it into a symphony of mostly transcendent highs. Critics who expressed disappointment at the band’s latest album, Hail to the Thief, might be surprised at just how powerful the new compositions sounded on Saturday. Tracks such as Myxomatosis and Backdrifts boasted muscular, highly percussive arrangements that transformed them into arena-filling anthems.

Although Yorke added his protest last week to the chorus of anger about George Bush’s state visit, he made no overt political comment in Manchester. Indeed, the singer barely spoke at all between songs, but he was clearly fired by an infectious enthusiasm and danced manically for most of the set. If his voice sometimes evoked the imperious sneer of Johnny Rotten, it also conjured up moments of intense beauty, as in the slow-building requiem Exit Music (for a Film).

A band on top of its game can subject its music to all manner of experimental abuse without destroying it, and so it proved here. Some tracks were flayed to within an inch of their lives, particularly from Jonny Greenwood’s vicious whiplash guitar. Other songs were simply allowed to unravel after accumulating an extra layer of vocal and melodic fragments that had been sampled and looped live on stage.

Radiohead treated their set almost like a gigantic piece of avant-garde art, a sonic collage loosely yoked together with snippets of radio news and cryptic film dialogue. There were few flat moments, although minor archive tracks such as Climbing up the Walls sounded like monochrome juvenilia compared to the more passionate, complex, multi-layered new material.

That said, some old favourites almost blew the roof off, especially the chiming euphoria of Fake Plastic Trees and a climactic audience singalong to Karma Police. For a band sometimes dismissed as sour-faced boffins, Radiohead still know how to mount an explosively exciting show.

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