Ed O'Brien on Saints of Somewhere

Ed O'Brien names his saints, the heroes and defining influences in his life, for Kirsty Robinson's podcast Saints of Somewhere, with a solo album on the way and Radiohead about to headline Glastonbury for the third time. When his son was born, he says, “I really contemplated leaving the band because I thought I just don't want to be an absent father.” He came from a split family, and the hurt of it left him in a mild depression that wasn't sorted out until his 30s. From his mother he took kindness, and from his father, an osteopath who felt his Irishness keenly in 1970s Oxford, an outsider's habit of questioning authority.

He met Colin Greenwood in a school play in 1982, when Colin spotted his New Order badge. In the summer of 1985 he was on his way to the music school to jam, with the acoustic guitar he had been given at Christmas, when Thom Yorke, whom he knew from the school bus and from school plays, came out and asked if he could come along, and O'Brien's life fell into focus. Radiohead were signed in 1991, he thinks, because “Smells Like Teen Spirit” had made quiet verses and loud choruses what the labels wanted, and “Jonny, Tom and I would stamp on our distortion boxes when it came to the choruses”. The pay-what-you-like release of In Rainbows worked out fine, he says. About 60 per cent of people paid something, the Italians paid most per head, and the British came next.

Brazil first reached him through a compilation left in their management office, in his unhappy days around OK Computer. Years later, in a bad way, he and his wife Susan spent a week with a healer in central Brazil, and something happened that Western medicine could not explain. “I was like a kid, magic does exist,” he says. After the 2012 tour the family lived on a farm there. Two months of trying to make electronic music in a shed went nowhere, so he picked up his acoustic guitar and songs began to come. Back home he went to Wales for a couple of weeks and more came, with Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass the big influence. He meant to take them to the band, but when they reconvened it was clear they would not fit.

On a night out, O'Brien once shocked Kanye West by telling him that 98 per cent of white British musicians, asked whether they believed in God, would say no way.