Ed O'Brien on JOHN ROBB

Ed O'Brien talks to John Robb over video from his London home a few weeks into the pandemic, around the release of Earth, and the first half is about Manchester, where he was living in 1989. Oxford, he says, was an academic city with the car works at the other end of it and no music scene, and he was in a school band that had not yet become Radiohead, desperate to get to a city that had one. In Manchester nobody cared where he came from. The examples are small and exact: being called love by the woman serving chips and gravy, and having an Irish surname in a city full of Irish heritage after growing up somewhere with almost none.

Robb shares that period, and the talk moves easily between the clubs O'Brien went to and what he took from them. He also comes to his role in the band, which he describes as being its mum, and to the guitarists who shaped him, John McGeoch, Will Sergeant and Johnny Marr.

He traces the record's gestation a very long way back. The Brazil in it is the meeting of two things he loves, the trance and momentum of carnival and something older and British that feels as if it comes up out of the ground, which he says begins from a very Welsh place. Primal Scream fed into it too.