Ed O'Brien on BBC Radio 6

Ed O'Brien talks to Matt Everitt on 6 Music about his first solo record, produced by Flood and Catherine Marks, with Omar Hakim, Glenn Kotche, Laura Marling and Adrian Utley of Portishead among the players. He started it, then put it on hold in 2014 for a year and a half in the studio and two years on tour with Radiohead, because he cannot run two things at once.

Singing was the hard part. The voice is the biggest BS detector, he says, and a lot of singers reach a studio after a run of gigs, when he had done none. He trusted Flood, who had once spent 12 hours on a single Bono vocal, and some days he simply couldn't do it. The record company chose “Brasil”, which he calls an eight-minute song, as the first full song heard from the record, which surprised him.

In Brazil he set up a load of gear to make something electronic and after six weeks had got nowhere. Every day at 11 he stopped for a cup of tea and put music on, and one morning it was Primal Scream's Screamadelica: when “Movin' On Up” came on he swore a great deal, delighted, and knew it was the kind of music he wanted to make. Two nights watching the samba schools at the Rio carnival did the rest, and the repetition reminded him of rave. Back home he went looking for the wildest country in Britain and found a cottage in mid Wales near where Robert Plant and Jimmy Page wrote, where “The Battle of Evermore” suddenly made sense.

He wanted a hopeful record, direct, with his heart on his sleeve, and a way of throwing off his Oxford shackles. Plenty of people will slag it off, he expects, and he says he doesn't care.