Ed O'Brien on BBC 6 Music

Ed O'Brien picks records for Craig Charles's 6 Music breakfast show in the station's Radiohead week, just off the road. He chose them by walking along his CD shelves and asking what he wanted to hear now, and his album of the year by country miles is the Streets' Original Pirate Material, which clicked driving round North London at ten at night. He plays “Turn the Page”, the Congos' “Fisherman” and Asian Dub Foundation's “Basta”.

He went to university in Manchester in 1987 for the music of the city, the Smiths above all, and they split within three weeks of his arrival. In England, he says, people judge Radiohead the moment they open their mouths, as boys from university and private school, and touring abroad is a relief. “We are what we are.” He never could stand Pink Floyd's music, and for years fought the comparison people made with them, until he watched a documentary on the making of The Dark Side of the Moon with his girlfriend and she turned to him at the end and said Radiohead were just like them. She and O'Brien are about to have their first child.

Every song is credited to Radiohead, a leaf taken from R.E.M. and U2. Thom Yorke writes the lyrics and most of the music, Jonny Greenwood a lot of it, and it becomes a Radiohead song in rehearsal. When the cheques came in around OK Computer he bought a house in 1997 and paid off the mortgage in four months, then had four years of guilt about it. Another house or a fleet of cars would only be a distraction. “I was put on this planet to be in this band,” he says.

When they started, “we thought that there was salvation in this music”, and it turned out not to sort out anyone's happiness. The music has more joy in it now, the joy of Bob Marley and the Wailers, and that is where he hopes they are heading. At the Roman arena in Nîmes the first half hour felt strange, until they had paid their dues to 2,000 years of the place.