Ed O'Brien on Alt 92.3

Ed O'Brien talks to Alt 92.3 for Radio.com in February 2020, two months before Earth comes out on 17 April, two days after his birthday. The title means the planet and the ground underfoot, and the working title was The Pale Blue Dot, after Carl Sagan. “Shangri-La” is named for the lost utopia and for the area of that name at Glastonbury, where you find your tribe.

The moment he wanted to know how music was made was the Police's “Walking on the Moon”, at 10, and Andy Summers' guitar with its delay and flanger. It was a song about the moon that sounded as if it had been recorded there. He never had a hand in Radiohead's videos, he adds; “Street Spirit” was nothing to do with him.

He joined the band at 16, in 1985, and everything came into focus. Whatever a teenager's lows were, they weren't low, because he had his brothers and the music. Now he is not defined by Radiohead, and if it ended tomorrow he would be sad but would not go to pieces. The songs on Earth carry Brazil and its carnival rhythms, and he read Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass while he demoed them. What he is proudest of is finishing it, and that the sessions never got nasty.