Ed O'Brien

the outskirts of oxford

Edward John O'Brien was born on 15 April 1968 and grew up on the outskirts of Oxford, in a family whose people came from Ballyporeen in County Tipperary. Trips there felt like going home, and he has said he cried on the flight back from Cork. His parents split up when he was 10. “I think that's when music became my refuge,” he told The Guardian in 2020, and he carried a Sanyo cassette player everywhere. Cricket got there first: in 1976 he watched West Indies beat England at the Oval on television, and the game stayed with him for good.

At Abingdon School, a private boys' school south of Oxford, he played Lysander in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Thom Yorke was writing the music for the production, and in one rehearsal Yorke swore at the teacher. O'Brien recognised another outsider, and in 1985, aged 17, he, Yorke, Colin Greenwood and Phil Selway started a band they called On a Friday, after their rehearsal day. Jonny Greenwood came in on harmonica soon after.

He learned the guitar inside the band. His first was a Westone Spectrum, and in early 1987 he paid £189 for a Squier Stratocaster, the only guitar he owned until they signed. What he loved was the Smiths, and Johnny Marr, the Edge, Peter Buck and Andy Summers on “Walking on the Moon” more than any soloist.

I think that's why bands form, don't they? … They form largely to… form your own little gang, your own little bubble, your own little world.

Ed O'Brien · Pittsburgh, 13 August 1997

manchester

He chose the University of Manchester “because of the music scene and really because of the Smiths”, as he told Rolling Stone, and read economics there to understand how the world works. He lived in the Owens Park halls and became their social secretary, booking bands. Trying to get Peter Hook to DJ, he spent about 40 minutes on the phone with Rob Gretton at Factory Records, and he counts that call as the start of his education in the music business. In the summer of 1989 he ran a club night in Oxford for ten weeks, every one sold out, on the Owens Park PA, which he drove down in a Transit with Yorke as his roadie. He graduated in 1990.

the sweeper

On a Friday signed to EMI between December 1991 and March 1992 and became Radiohead. He later told MPs what the deal had been: six albums, a royalty of about 12 per cent, and the recordings owned by the label for life. From then until 2018, he says, it was pretty much nonstop.

On Pablo Honey Yorke drove the songs on rhythm guitar and Jonny Greenwood played lead, and O'Brien's job was to find the room between them. He calls himself the sweeper. Yorke and Jonny often arrived at rehearsal with their parts already worked out, and he was left asking where he fitted in. By The Bends his answer was sound: an EBow, a Boss delay, the noise you get by strumming the strings above the nut. That noise, found at a soundcheck in Japan on The Bends tour, became the opening of “Lucky”. It was O'Brien, too, who heard the band's running joke from that tour and said it should be a song, and it became “Karma Police”.

He is blunt about the first record. He calls Pablo Honey the band's worst album and says EMI would have dropped them without “Creep”. The Bends is where he hears Radiohead first making something of their own. His Squier was taken in 1995, and two Fender Eric Clapton Stratocasters replaced it.

That's kind of my DNA, if you like. It's all about the sound, it wasn't about the guitar hero.

Ed O'Brien · That Pedal Show, 5 April 2019

Ed O'Brien on the phone to BBC Radio 1 from the dressing room at Toad's Place, New Haven, 30 May 1995· BBC Radio 1the whole interview →

ok computer

He meant to bring songs of his own to the band in 1996, as OK Computer began, and doubt and deference to Yorke and Jonny stopped him. Much of the record was made at St Catherine's Court, a manor house near Bath, the band's first time recording out in the country, and he still talks about a night of hard frost under a full moon when the whole countryside was lit up. “Let Down” and “Climbing Up the Walls” were played live in a room there, the last time, he thinks, the band recorded that way. On “Subterranean Homesick Alien” he plays a Rickenbacker twelve-string, and on “No Surprises” a capo high up the neck over Yorke's part.

“Let Down” is on the record because of him. Yorke said in 2025 that he fought to leave it off, “but Ed was, like, 'If it's not, I'm leaving.'”

At Glastonbury in June 1997 the equipment failed on stage, and O'Brien talked Yorke through the set one song at a time, as he told Jo Whiley on BBC Radio 2 20 years later. He has a plain way of putting his part in the band in those years: Yorke was the dad, and he was the mum. The tour that followed made Radiohead very big and left O'Brien very low, and the summer of 1998, at home in Oxford, was the worst of it.

Ed O'Brien interviewed at Pinkpop, 27 May 1996· Pinkpopthe whole interview →

the diary

On Kid A the guitars were often not wanted at all. He told The Guardian about Yorke coming in with “Everything in Its Right Place” on a synthesiser, and the thought that went with it: “I'm going to be found out.” He calls what followed a creative paralysis. Back in the studio in January 2000, Nigel Godrich suggested a way in for the first couple of weeks: no guitars, drums or vocals, everything made electronically.

He found a way through with a Fernandes Sustainer fitted to one of the Clapton Stratocasters, a pickup that holds a note for as long as he wants, which Michael Brook, the inventor of the Infinite Guitar, had suggested. With an early looper it made “Treefingers”, ten minutes of his guitar that Yorke rebuilt in a sampler until no one would guess it was a guitar.

From 22 July 1999 to June 2000 he kept a diary on the band's website, rehearsal by rehearsal and then session by session, and the site keeps it in full. It has a new song of Yorke's that arrives without a name, the 373 days it took to finish “Knives Out”, the string session in an old abbey, and, after two months of silence in 2000, an entry that says he loves the record. He stopped drinking that year. Johnny Marr gave him Aldous Huxley's The Perennial Philosophy.

I wanted to demystify the whole recording process. … When you're not in a band you think that there's some kind of voodoo or there's some kind of magic that goes on.

Ed O'Brien · BBC Radio, 17 October 2000

In April 2001 he and Selway flew to Auckland to play five nights with Neil Finn's 7 Worlds Collide.

Ed O'Brien on MusiquePlus in Montreal, 18 October 2000, the month Kid A came out· MusiquePlusthe whole interview →

in rainbows

Hail to the Thief was, he said in 2003, “the first album where, at the end of making it, we haven't wanted to kill each other.” He and Selway chose its running order and put “2 + 2 = 5” first. In Rainbows took three years and, he said later, half killed them; “House of Cards” alone was recorded six times. In 2006, on a six-week American tour around the birth of his daughter, he told himself he could not go on. Marr and Finn talked him round.

In Rainbows went out in October 2007 with no label and a price the buyer chose. Radiohead had left EMI, and O'Brien told The Observer that its new owner, Guy Hands, “didn't know what to offer us.” The next year he was among the musicians behind the Featured Artists Coalition, launched in October 2008 to argue for musicians to own what they make. He was one of its directors by March 2009 and stepped down from the board in October 2021. Nigel Godrich gave Rolling Stone the shortest description of him anyone has managed: “Ed is very much a diplomat.” Asked by a Guardian reader in 2018 who the hardest member of Radiohead was, Jonny Greenwood named O'Brien, who had boxing training, and who was also, he said, the most placatory of the five.

brazil and back

The King of Limbs began, he told NPR in 2011, with five weeks of the band playing less and listening more. The tour ended in 2012, and at the end of that year he took his family to a farm in the Brazilian countryside between Rio and São Paulo for a year, with the children at the local school. “If you're in the creative flow, carry on without me,” he told the band. Carnival in 2013 was the eureka moment, and the songs started coming. He finished them in a rented cottage in mid-Wales.

Why do we love that society? Because it's so warm, it's so open, it's so loving. And part for me was throwing off my Oxford shackles.

Ed O'Brien · BBC Radio 6 Music, 5 December 2019

In the summer of 2014 the first session for what became A Moon Shaped Pool went on his songs, with Godrich's blessing, and he soon saw it was a mistake. “Radiohead is about the communal, but it's also about serving the songs of Thom,” he told Billboard. “It's not set up to serve the songs of me.” He recorded the whole of A Moon Shaped Pool on the guitar he had dreamt up in 2013, which Fender put out in November 2017 as the EOB Sustainer Stratocaster, with a Flower of Life on the neckplate where a name would go. He had told the band he would not tour the record, and then toured it.

Ed O'Brien in conversation for Fender, November 2014· Fenderthe whole interview →

earth

On 29 March 2019 Radiohead went into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Brooklyn, inducted by David Byrne, and only O'Brien and Selway went, because, he has said, no one else would. He says he turned down the teleprompter that everyone else read from, Trent Reznor included. He called it “a big fucking deal” from the stage and thanked Yorke and the Greenwoods, his brothers, who were not there.

“Santa Teresa”, an instrumental, came out under the initials EOB in October 2019, and his first album, Earth, on 17 April 2020, two days after his 52nd birthday. It was produced by Flood, a friend from the school gates, with Catherine Marks co-producing “Olympik”. Omar Hakim and Nathan East played the first weeks in a rented house in Wales, Laura Marling sang on “Cloak of the Night”, Adrian Utley of Portishead came in later, and Colin Greenwood played bass on “Brasil”. O'Brien played bass on the record too. He had thought someone else should sing, possibly Yorke, until Flood talked him round. Its working title was The Pale Blue Dot, after Carl Sagan, and when people asked what kind of record he was making, he would say, joking, “an existential dance record”. “There is truth in there as well,” he told GQ. Earth reached number 13 in Britain.

He played it live four times, at clubs in Toronto, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles in February 2020, the first on 7 February in Toronto, and once more at the BBC 6 Music Festival in London in March. Then the pandemic took the tour, the festivals and Glastonbury, where he was on the bill. He has since said the record holds half-truths, and that he forced his love of Brazilian music into it.

In the second lockdown, in the winter of 2020, a depression set in that lasted most of 2021. He wanted neither medication nor conventional therapy. “My therapy was literally locking myself in a room for three hours in the morning,” he told Rolling Stone, while his wife worked and the children were schooled at home. He walked the Welsh hills with his dog.

blue morpho

In 2024 the five met in a rehearsal room for the first time in six years, and he says the chemistry was there from the start. In November and December 2025 they played 20 arena nights in Madrid, Bologna, London, Copenhagen and Berlin, the first Radiohead shows in seven years. Singing his own songs, he says, had made him a better backing singer: he could meet Yorke vocally for the first time.

I cried more in that 8 weeks than I had in the previous 8 years, 'cause it was so… powerful.

Ed O'Brien · KEXP, 24 March 2026

Blue Morpho came out on 22 May 2026 on Transgressive, under his own name. “I'm not hiding any more,” he said. “I was hiding behind a doppelgänger called EOB.” It was made with Paul Epworth, another parent from the same school, who wrote the songs with him, and Selway plays drums on two of them. The title is a butterfly he saw in Brazil, and the record is about coming out the other side of the depression. The whole of it is tuned to A=432 Hz rather than the standard 440, an idea the band had turned down when he raised it for A Moon Shaped Pool. In October 2026 he took it on the road for the first time, eight nights in concert halls from Amsterdam to Belfast. The Barbican sold out in under a day.

Ed O'Brien talking to Apple Music about Blue Morpho, June 2026· Apple Musicthe whole interview →