Ed O'Brien on Pittsburgh

Ed O'Brien comes in out of a storm to a Pittsburgh studio on the day Radiohead play a sold-out Metropol, with Teenage Fanclub opening. He saw them in Oxford two months earlier, went backstage and asked them on to the American dates for a month, and he admits that when Radiohead started, “we blatantly ripped them off.” Radiohead ripped off the Pixies, Dinosaur Jr and Throwing Muses too, which were, he says, the only guitar bands of the late 1980s doing anything interesting, and Radiohead had three guitarists and three distortion pedals to do it with.

The band began at school outside Oxford in about 1985, out of boredom, a gang of their own against the world. They weren't friends to begin with, and there was nowhere to play but village halls.

He has spent an hour walking round Pittsburgh admiring the buildings, and would have liked to see it 25 or 30 years ago with the steel mills working. He grew up on American television, from Starsky and Hutch to Hawaii Five-O, with Laurel and Hardy at six o'clock, and he was “totally in love with Samantha when I was like five years old”, in Bewitched. American television reached across Europe, he says: in Holland the Dutch speak very good English but sound like Starsky and Hutch. Pittsburgh has won him over already; at breakfast in a café this morning he could smoke a cigarette indoors.