Ed O'Brien on BBC Radio 6 Music Festival

Ed O'Brien talks to Mark Radcliffe and Stuart Maconie at the 6 Music Festival the morning after his first British show as a frontman. He had played four shows before it and was, by his own account, very nervous. Richard Hawley had told him some five years earlier that it may be only four yards from where he usually stands to the centre of a stage, but it feels more like 400. It did at first, he says, and it is starting to feel right.

Phil Selway, who made the same move from the back of the stage to the middle, told him it feels strange at the beginning and then becomes a muscle, which O'Brien found encouraging.

They had rehearsed hard, decamping to mid-Wales from the second week of January, and the presenters say they could hear it in how settled the show was.

Something had always felt lacking, he says, and it turned out to be the writing and the singing. He also had the opposite fear: the others had made good records outside the band, and he did not want to be the one who put out something that was not.