Wouldn't want to get silly in a conversation about Ray-dee-oh-head! 🙂
The Smiths were a great band, for mine—over five or so years they produced about eighty songs of nearly uniformly high quality touching on so many different aspects of real lives.
The distinction between The Smiths and Radiohead is, roughly, the distinction between two great traditions of artistic rock and roll, punk and prog. One tradition is about processing and reproducing concrete, bodily experiences and emotions through music, the other's about concepts, abstractions, and sonic experiments.
It's similar to the distinction between montage, collage, cut-ups and objets trouvés on the one hand, and simulation, animation, abstract expressionism on the other; between something DIY and something "bespoke"; between chancers, misfits and weirdos with few prospects, and university students like our Thom with an 'h' and Jonny without an 'h'. Or between Johnny Marr and Jonny Greenwood for that matter: fretwork versus frottage. Sure, there is a sort of Yes and Pink Floyd-listening gentleman who has sex by the lava lamp with all his clothes on and gets the horn from the idea that Radiohead are the "greatest band of this era" or whatever, but it doesn't matter, because they're not.
