Ed O'Brien on Virgin Radio

Ed O'Brien tells Edith Bowman on her Virgin Radio breakfast show that the time he suffered most from depression was the height of OK Computer, with Radiohead on top of the world. It is, she says, his first interview in five years, and A Moon Shaped Pool is on her turntable. Success is a wonderful thing, he says, and it can be hollow; these days the getting there is what counts for him.

The record was slow to start. The band meant to regroup three years before this interview but put it off, setting Radiohead aside while Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood worked on something together, and began two years before it. Going back after a break is ominous, and nobody makes them, because “we've got no bosses, we are the bosses”. They carry 31 years of history from a school band started in 1985, and getting it turning again is like a stew that only tastes right after about 12 hours. From signing until the end of the OK Computer tour in 1998 they never stopped.

In Rainbows was the first tour they really enjoyed, at ease at last in big places, and The King of Limbs was a reaction to it, made with little wish to pick up guitars. His favourite on the new record is “Daydreaming”, one of the few new songs that came out of rehearsals. The short films made around the album's release were a nod to the blips, short pieces of 20 seconds or so, the band made around Kid A; Jonny, he thinks, suggested Ben Wheatley, and the band half wondered whether they could ask Christopher Nolan.

Fatherhood reset his listening. His son was born when the band were everywhere, and he struggled to leave him. His children hear music the way he did before “the taste police” arrive at 14, and watching Mamma Mia with them on Boxing Day gave him spine tingles, even with Pierce Brosnan singing. His Spotify playlist that morning runs from Public Image Ltd's “Public Image” to, say, Glen Campbell's “Gentle on My Mind” or “Southern Nights”. He ends on a theory he admits he bores people with. Music and magic have five letters each, two of them different, and when the magic isn't there it is time to do something else.