Ed O'Brien on BBC Radio 6 Music Festival

Ed O'Brien comes in to the 6 Music Festival the morning after his first show in Britain or Europe as a singer, his fifth in all, and he was very nervous. The Sheffield singer Richard Hawley told him about five years ago that it might only be four yards from stage centre to stage right, but it feels more like 400. Phil Selway, who also left the back for the middle, told him it would feel weird at first and then become a muscle. His live band had never played together, so from the second week of January he took them to the house in mid Wales where he made some of his album, Earth, and they hammered it for two and a half weeks. Colin Greenwood was in, having sneaked in rather than bother him for the guest list. The crowd knew only two songs, but the last of the night, “Brasil”, which few of them knew, got a response that gave him a real moment.

Making the record with Flood and Catherine Marks, he was a consensus man until it sounded really bad and he had to ask himself what he thought. He tried an electronic record first, because that seemed to be where the pioneers of sound were, and after about six weeks it was rubbish, so he picked up the acoustic guitar in the corner instead. Radiohead serve Thom Yorke's songs, he says, and the slight hole he always felt turned out to be songwriting and singing. He held back for years, not wanting to be the one in the band who put out something that wasn't very good, and wanting to be at home while his children were small.

Out front he can feel the moment an audience's attention wavers. Primal Scream's Bobby Gillespie, once his next-door neighbour, texted him his manifesto on being a front man, and it is unrepeatable.