With its turn-of-the-century album “Kid A,” Radiohead adopted a brave new sonic palette and with it a small tweak to its touring strategy: make Pittsburghers drive to Cleveland.

It’s likely not something Radiohead and its agent sat around and talked about specifically, and it might not even have occurred to them until years later, but the reality is that all we ever saw of Radiohead was the first third of the British art-rock band’s career, when times were simpler and people still screamed for “Creep.”

The group’s last trip here was at a now-defunct club in 1997, so we have some catching up to do when Radiohead plays its first major concert in Pittsburgh Thursday at PPG Paints Arena, Uptown.

The band arrives two years removed from the release of its ninth album, “A Moon Shaped Pool,” which factors heavily into the show, and Thom Yorke and company have been delving a lot into the previous three albums — “Hail to the Thief” (2003), “In Rainbows” (2007) and “The King of Limbs” (2011) — so it will be the first time Pittsburgh fans witness most of the material live.

BACK TO THE BEGINNING

Radiohead played its first U.S. show in June 1993 in Boston, behind the uneven debut album “Pablo Honey,” riding some hype as “the British Nirvana,” mostly because of the anguished outsider anthem “Creep.”

Radiohead went home and then returned in September to support Belly, a new band fronted by Throwing Muses’ Tanya Donelly with a breakout hit, “Feed the Tree.” Playing the industrial dance club Metropol in the Strip on Oct. 11, Radiohead, fronted by Mr. Yorke, with a full head of golden blond hair and a gloriously airy falsetto, delivered most of “Pablo Honey,” along with the title track of the next album, “The Bends.” It also did a few non-album singles, including “Banana Co.” and “Pop Is Dead,” a slag on the music industry claiming that “radio has salmonella.”

The singer re-emerged during Belly’s encore to sing harmonies with Ms. Donelly on a tender acoustic version of “Untogether.”

After tours in 1995 with R.E.M. and then Soul Asylum (both big misses for Pittsburgh), Radiohead jumped on a summer 1996 tour with Alanis Morissette, who, a year after “Jagged Little Pill,” was drawing sold-out crowds of screaming young fans.

“The R.E.M. audience is not as crazy for the music as Alanis’ fans, that’s for certain,” Radiohead bassist Colin Greenwood told the PG at the time. “The average age at an Alanis show is 14 or 15 years old, and they’re girls, so the screaming is just intense.”

Being something of a mismatch, on Aug. 27, 1996, at Star Lake in Burgettstown, Radiohead left those fans rather high and dry, especially with the refusal to play “Creep.”

“The mopey quintet from England took the stage promptly at 8 p.m.,” according to Tony Norman’s PG review, “and proceeded to cast the entire amphitheater into darkness. Kicking off its set with a loud, sluggish version of ‘The Bends,’ Radiohead underwhelmed the crowd with cacophony and orange stage lights.”

Mr. Yorke scoffed at the calls for “Creep” and instead the band did two sneak peeks of the forthcoming magnum opus “OK Computer”: “Karma Police” and a 14-minute “Paranoid Android” that had to have been freaky and disorienting to 14-year-olds. “These kids were here to see Alanis,” the review said, “and weren’t interested in dealing with five guys wearing black.”

At one point, Mr. Yorke suggested that the bored fans in the front trade places with the more enthusiastic fans on the lawn, unconcerned that Star Lake security would have gone ballistic.

Not everyone was unimpressed with Radiohead.

“I remember that show well,” says Pittsburgh musician Jason Trunzo. “My band DOSE played the second stage. During Radiohead’s set, my guitarist and I looked at each other and said, ‘We s--k.’”

During that interview, the bassist described Radiohead recording the follow-up to “The Bends” in “a secret location” in the countryside, kind of like Led Zeppelin.

“The next record,” he joked, “will definitely spearhead the new wave progressive-rock revival. It’s going to be a song cycle that will be staged on ice.”

It does look like ice on the cover of 1997’s “OK Computer,” which many fans still consider to be Radiohead’s finest hour — or 53 minutes, 21 seconds. Radiohead makes those minutes worthwhile in the harrowing art-rock masterpiece, countering grunge by echoing the classic rock of Pink Floyd, Bowie and U2 while laying on the alienation, paranoia and existential dread.

“ ‘OK Computer’ was like having a crush on an older woman as a teen — complex and gorgeous but dangerous and confusing and sophisticated and temperamental,” says Pittsburgh’s William-John Ainsworth III (aka Johnny Saint-Lethal), who formed the Britpop-style band The Show. “Everything an album should be. A little bit afraid of it. It grew on me with every listen.”

“OK Computer” front to back would have made for a compelling evening at Metropol on Aug. 13, 1997. Instead, Radiohead sprinkled it with “The Bends” in an 18-song set with not a sniff of “Pablo Honey.” The only song still on the set list from the Belly show four years earlier was “The Bends” title track.

“The ‘OK Computer’ tour show at Metropol still ranks as one of the top 10 shows I’ve ever seen,” says Pittsburgh lawyer and veteran concertgoer Richard Victoria. “The rhythm section stood out as being even greater than I could have expected. That has certainly continued in their post-‘OK’ work.”

Says former PG music critic Ed Masley, “My memory of the show at Metropol involves the people I was with insisting Teenage Fanclub had just blown them off the stage while I was trying to enjoy their set.”

Mr. Victoria, a friend of Mr. Masley’s, affirms it wasn’t him.

THE LET DOWN

That’s when the trail went cold in Pittsburgh.

And no one is sure why.

The Detroit Free Press did a story in 2008 theorizing that Radiohead hadn’t played the Motor City in a decade because it was avoiding venues with excessive sponsorship signage.

The story quoted former Capitol Records Vice President Phil Costello saying, “Thom is a real stickler about that. Two albums ago, he read a book or an article about corporate sponsorship, and it just sent him crawling up the wall. He decided there would be no more of the [B.S.] on the side [of the stage].”

A former manager at the pavilion said he was unaware of any of those obstacles with Radiohead in this century. It’s more likely that Pittsburgh is just not an A-market for indie rock (witness the small turnout of the Arcade Fire show at the arena in 2014).

In any case, between the heightened anti-corporate sentiments, the “OK Computer” hangover, the rise of countless disciples (led by Coldplay) and a restless creative spirit, Radiohead did a complete sonic makeover on the esoteric “Kid A” in 2000 that carried into “Amnesiac” the next year.

Despite the retraction from accessible rock, Radiohead bumped up to amphitheater headliner, bypassing Pittsburgh for Blossom Music Center (Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio) and Merriweather Post Pavilion (Columbia, Md.) among other venues.

Since then, Radiohead, while lengthening the gaps between projects, has remained the standard-bearer of the critic-approved indie rock, whether sniping at the Bush administration with “Hail to the Thief,” dropping the much-admired “In Rainbows” as a pay-what-you-want download, playing epic shows at Coachella or avoiding any major missteps with the albums.

“Apart from ‘In Rainbows,’ every album since ‘OK Computer’ has been ‘What the hell is this?’ and/or ‘Is that it, then?’ But then they grow and grow and you slowly fall in love with them,” Mr. Ainsworth says. “And I’m not just on a Radiohead bandwagon. They deserve the genius label few bands do, if for no other reason that the band is really damn good at being themselves, which in and of itself has entirely become a lost art.”

Reports from the current tour suggest that we’re getting Radiohead again in an ideal phase.

Variety recently said of Mr. Yorke, “He’ll be 50 this year, but he looks like he’s having more fun being in Radiohead than ever before.”

“Fun” and Radiohead rarely mix in the same sentence, but we can take his word for it and see for ourselves on Thursday.

Scott Mervis: smervis@post-gazette.com.

First Published: July 24, 2018, 1:12 p.m.