Ed O'Brien on BBC 6 Music

Ed O'Brien and Colin Greenwood come into 6 Music to talk about Anyone Can Play Guitar, Jon Spira's film on the Oxford music scene, and Colin has just met Bootsy Collins in the BBC building; Collins was wearing a purple sequinned top hat. Colin got a handshake and a smile, and O'Brien took a photograph.

Their first proper gig was at the Jericho Tavern. They started gigging “probably about 86”, one of them says, and by the time they came back from college in 1990 and 1991 a promoter there had made Oxford a stop for every touring indie band. At 14 or 15, one of them says, “the last thing you want to hear is any clever music”, and Oxford's was polite and literary until Ride. O'Brien, at college in Manchester from 1987 to 1990, says Ride made them believe a band from Oxford could be cool; without that belief, you might as well move to Swindon. A scene needs three things, they argue: a fanzine to get on the cover of, because the national music papers would not touch them, somewhere to rehearse and somewhere to play.

The Candyskins were good mates who helped them a lot, and watching them struggle while Radiohead did well left “a lot of embarrassment and guilt going on there”, O'Brien says. Radiohead's rise came quickly, within six months of deciding in 1991 not to wait three years for Jonny Greenwood to finish college, because of the bands before them and because of Nirvana. Their early songs used the quiet verse and loud chorus, a Pixies trick, just as the industry went looking for more of it. “Good timing is everything.”

A second clip from the same day is about Record Store Day. O'Brien explains that “The Butcher” comes from the King of Limbs sessions and “Supercollider” was finished after the album came out, and denies a second finished album in the wings: about 40 minutes is their ideal length, and “the fittest survive”. Colin worked in a record shop, Our Price, after university, and on tour he and his brother Jonny always hunt down the local record shop; at Bill's Records in Dallas, the old man who ran it once simply handed Colin a Joy Division box set.