Ed O'Brien on BBC 6 Music

Ed O'Brien is Adam Buxton's guest on a space-themed Big Mixtape on 6 Music, midway through a Radiohead record he thinks is the best they have made and hopes to see out this year. In Rainbows took three years, “House of Cards” was recorded six times, and songs they took on tour in 2006, over what he calls about 50 shows, came out mostly rubbish when they first recorded them with Nigel Godrich. Radiohead in the studio had always meant tin helmets on, “a war of attrition”, and at the end they agreed never to work that way again. O'Brien calls it the end of Radiohead Mark 2.

By the third rehearsal, in 1985, he thought they were the best band in the world. His father found one good song on Pablo Honey, and the music papers disliked everything about them. “We were five minor public school boys from Oxfordshire,” he says. For The Bends, EMI wanted five potential singles recorded up front, which made the first sessions in London disastrous, so they took the songs on the road and cut most of them live in about three weeks at the Manor outside Oxford.

He finds Meeting People Is Easy, Grant Gee's documentary about the OK Computer tour, accurate; they wanted that success and were too shy and unprepared to handle it. The one criticism he remembers came from a website, around 2003, that named him the worst-dressed member of Radiohead, and looking at his ill-fitting trousers in the site's pictures of him, he thinks it was right. Early on, Godrich told them “thank God you guys are like method actors”. Thom Yorke sings most of the backing vocals on the records, and O'Brien, self-conscious beside a better voice, held back on his, though he loves singing and says that with confidence it gets easier. “Meeting in the Aisle” came from O'Brien fooling with his pedals late at night at Jane Seymour's house, St Catherine's Court, with Sam and Henry of Zero 7 programming the drums.

He is cutting his stage guitars down to two, a Gibson 335 and a Telecaster. In the early days the band joked that Colin Greenwood fluffed the chord changes of “Punchdrunk Lovesick Singalong”. A great night, he says, is “an exchange of energy”. His last pick for the tape is Mary Wells's “My Guy”, the song he would want as an astronaut looking back at the Earth, because it would warm his heart.