Ed O'Brien on BBC 6 Music

Ed O'Brien goes back over his firsts with Matt Everitt on 6 Music's The First Time With. The first album he remembers is Bridge Over Troubled Water. His first single, in 1978, was Ally's Tartan Army, Scotland's World Cup song, and he still knows some of the words. Two things drew him to guitar: the echo and chorus on Andy Summers's playing on “Walking on the Moon”, and a Jam poster in WH Smith with Paul Weller in mid-air.

At school Phil Selway was a year above, the drummer in the coolest band in school, Jungle Telegraph. Colin Greenwood started talking to him about his New Order badge. Thom Yorke rode the bus with O'Brien's sister, and somebody wrote in a desk that Yorke loved her. Walking across the gravel to the music school with a new acoustic guitar, O'Brien met Yorke, who asked to come along, and felt “some kind of epiphany almost, like this is it”. The first recordings were made on a four-track in Selway's bedroom in the summer of 1986.

The Bends was their answer to being called one-hit wonders. “We just wanted to be Massive Attack,” he says, and Massive Attack came to a show and told them they loved “Creep”. Opening for Alanis Morissette in American venues that held 18,000, they tried a 12-minute “Paranoid Android”, a monstrosity, and three days after that tour, at St Catherine's Court, they cut “Climbing Up the Walls” and “Let Down”.

After Glastonbury 1997 he was acutely depressed. “I'm so unhappy, I feel so alone,” is how he remembers it, in the best band in the world with a record he was proud of. A bossa nova compilation was what reached him. After The King of Limbs the family lived on a farm in Brazil, and the Rio carnival is feeding the solo record he means to make next year. When he looks back on his deathbed, he says, “I'll think of us in a room working out songs”.

A part held back from the broadcast went out the next spring, the day after the OK Computer reissue was announced. “Lift” got the Morissette crowds up and grooving, and he thinks the band subconsciously killed it, because had OK Computer been their Jagged Little Pill, it would have killed them.