Ed O'Brien on BFI

Ed O'Brien sits on a panel at the BFI after a screening of Anyone Can Play Guitar, Jon Spira's film about the Oxford music scene, with Mark Gardner of Ride, Gaz Coombes of Supergrass and a member of the Candyskins. Spira made it for no money, with equipment taken from the film workshop he teaches at while it was closed. It was finished a year and a half before the screening, but getting it out needed money, above all for the sound mix. Stewart Lee, who went to Oxford gigs in the 80s, fobbed him off for a long time, until Spira talked his way into one of Lee's gigs with a rare Incredible Hulk comic for him and got his narrator. The film keeps the scene in which O'Brien's microphone dropped off because, one of its makers says, “it's a scrappy film and if it were anything else it would be really dishonest”. The closing of the Zodiac, the Oxford venue, was what set Spira going.

On the panel, O'Brien talks about the Candyskins, a band On a Friday, as Radiohead were then called, opened for around 1987, and a band he looked up to massively. When Radiohead were away and taking off and the Candyskins were not, there was a lot of love between them and a tension he did not know how to handle. “I still find it really emotional watching it,” he says, and he texted one of them as soon as he first saw the film. Watching it, one of the panel says, showed him that his band never knew when to give up.