Ed O'Brien on ABC.AU (Double J)

Ed O'Brien talks to Zan Rowe on Double J about Earth, his first solo album. The King of Limbs tour finished in Melbourne in 2012, and six days later he was on the edge of the Brazilian rainforest with his family, meaning to stay a year, with no wifi, no phone signal and time to write. Friends who asked what he was making were told an existential dance record, which he admits it is not. His first child, born in 2004, had already made him sort himself out, because “there's nothing like a child to shine a mirror on every little foible”.

The break let him look at a hole he had felt for years. Around In Rainbows he toyed with retraining, and asked his acupuncturist, who ran a school of five elements acupuncture, whether he could train, taken with the idea of walking away from something like Radiohead, as the Manchester United footballer Eric Cantona walked away at the top of his game; he comes from a family of osteopaths and was always the black sheep. The hole turned out to be songwriting.

Every morning at 11 he stopped for tea in a hut by a lake, and one day put on Screamadelica. “Movin' On Up” gave him the spine tingle, and gospel and soul gave him a template for lyrics he had never written before. The working title was Pale Blue Dot, after Carl Sagan, until a film took it. He met Flood, his favourite producer, at the school gates, where their children were at the same school, told him Foals' Holy Fire was his record of the year, and Flood said it was just pop music; later Flood offered to produce the record. The house band he started the record with, Omar Hakim on drums and Nathan East on bass (the rhythm section on Daft Punk's “Get Lucky”), came through Daft Punk's manager, with David Okumu alongside. “Olympik” is take four, and he doesn't think they did a take five.

After 35 years, he says, Radiohead have become an institution, like the BBC, a line he admits he took from Philip Selway.