Ed O'Brien

Ed O'Brien talks to Klinger of DC101, a Washington station, over Zoom just ahead of the release of Earth, and calls his state blissful ignorance, pleased the record is nearly out and finding the whole thing slightly unreal.

He was never more nervous in the making of it than when recording a duet with Laura Marling on a February afternoon in 2018, six or seven versions of it, until his fingers stopped going where he wanted them.

Klinger points out that after three decades in Radiohead the nerves might be expected to have gone, and that admitting to them is unusual. O'Brien says they feel entirely normal to him and are a good place to be, because being nervous means he still cares what happens.

Asked, cheerfully and bluntly, why it took him so long to make a record of his own, he is honest that he does not really know, beyond having eventually found a way of writing that worked.