Ed O'Brien on BBC Radio 5

Ed O'Brien sits on the panel of Fighting Talk, Colin Murray's sports quiz on BBC Radio 5 Live, for a Record Store Day music special with Steve Lamacq, Dion Dublin and Bob Mills. Murray introduces him by blaming him for the rumour that “Separator”, the last track on The King of Limbs, means a second part is on its way. The sound-effects box has died, so the effects come off an MP3 player held up to a microphone.

Asked for the strangest request of his career, O'Brien goes back to early 1994, when Radiohead were making The Bends and needed a support band for a three-day tour. The agent sent three demo tapes, and one was by Oasis. The band laughed, because the only Oasis they knew was the leisure centre in Swindon, and picked a band called Julie Dolphin. Four months later he saw Oasis on their way to superstardom.

His proudest moment is the Sunday night at Reading in 2009, the first festival where nerves did not get the better of them and they could enjoy it. His most embarrassing is day three of the Edgbaston Test in 1985, when at 17 and about four pints in he shouted abuse at the Australian fielder Greg Ritchie on the boundary. For Britain's most loathsome sportsman he names Joey Barton, who had just called himself the best midfielder in England; after what Barton had done, he thinks, “a degree of humility might be required”. The injured Owen Hargreaves is his pick for the man most likely to be in a dark room with “Creep”, because being cut off from the team is, he says, “like being the drummer in a band really”.

He makes the final against Mills, and has to defend the indefensible, that sitting through a Radiohead gig is a greater feat of endurance than a marathon. They would happily play for three and a half hours, “we don't have a break halfway through, we don't have a support band”, and if they feel pigheaded they play none of the tunes. His father, at a gig around the time of Kid A, asked where all the tunes were.