The band · the five
Ed O'Brien
Guitar · backing vocals
The guitar textures, and the diary this site keeps.
- Plays
- Guitar, effects, backing vocals
- Born
- 15 April 1968 · Oxford
- In the band since
- 1985, a founder of On a Friday
photo
Photo: Raph_PH · CC BY 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Edward John O'Brien, at 6ft 5in the tallest of the five, met the others at Abingdon and read economics at Manchester before Radiohead became the job. His instrument is as much the effects rack as the guitar, and the shimmer under many of the songs is his, built from delay, sustain and an EBow rather than riffs. He calls it servicing the song.
From July 1999 to June 2000 he kept an online diary through the sessions that became Kid A and Amnesiac. The first entry says “its great to be in our band”, and the whole diary is mirrored here. In 2008 he was one of the leading figures behind the Featured Artists Coalition, which campaigns for musicians to own the recordings they make.
Beyond Radiohead
His first solo album, Earth, came out under the name EOB in April 2020, shaped partly by the time he spent living in Brazil. The pandemic halted its tour, and that March he said he had most likely caught the virus himself. Blue Morpho, his first album under his own name, followed in May 2026.
His songs are in Songs, his nights on stage in the live archive. The nights he has played without the band are listed apart.