Ed O'Brien on Ninja Tune podcast

Ed O'Brien turns interviewer for the Ninja Tune podcast, sitting down at the Roundhouse with Dave Okumu of The Invisible to talk about Okumu's new record, and talks nearly as much as his guest. Okumu grew up the youngest of eight in Vienna, where his Kenyan father worked for the United Nations, and the first record he bought was Sign o' the Times. O'Brien answers with a Prince story: Radiohead's lawyer, Andrew Myers, found Prince standing beside him at an aftershow at the O2, asked whether he might play “Girls & Boys”, and Prince went on stage and played it for Myers.

O'Brien grew up in the 80s with the taste police out in force, a post-punk and Smiths kid who didn't hear Led Zeppelin until he was 26. His children, 12 and 10, are teaching him to listen again. Watching Mamma Mia with them one Christmas Eve gave him spine tingles, and Pharrell's “Happy” got better every time they put it on a loop.

He carried anger from his childhood into the band. “So I thought being in the best band in the world and having the love of a good woman, that's the thing that's going to solve all my problems,” he says. By the third record he could buy a little house, and it made things worse. His life turned round with a spiritual experience at a healer's in Brazil, which he still hasn't been able to tell his father about. At Carnival in Rio a mutual friend once sat him beside Kanye West, who took no interest in him for three hours until O'Brien said almost every British musician would answer of course not if asked whether they believed in God. West could not believe it.

Okumu, who cried two songs into a Radiohead show a few nights before, asks how they keep going. “If we're not feeling it, we won't do it,” O'Brien says, though there was momentum to keep up until the end of OK Computer. About nine years ago he stopped playing his luck down to old friends and decided the band's obligation was to live an extraordinary life, “and that doesn't mean that you become a wanker necessarily.” He is not famous the way Thom Yorke is, he says, and “I wouldn't do this if I couldn't get on the Underground.”