Ed O'Brien on JOHN ROBB

Ed O'Brien talks to John Robb over Zoom from his home in London, with Earth just out in the middle of the pandemic and O'Brien five weeks into getting over the virus. They start in Manchester, where he went as a student because Oxford, an academic city known for its car works, had no music scene. Nobody there cared that he came from Oxford, and on his first day the woman in the chip shop called him love.

The record began when his children were eight and six and the family went to live in Brazil. He put the laptop away, because Ableton was not where his heart was, and picked up the old Martin acoustic in the corner. Back home he wrote in a rented cottage in the Elan Valley in Mid Wales, over the mountain from Robert Plant's house. “Brasil” puts the two places in one song: the first part Welsh and acoustic, in five-four, then the trance of carnival. Hearing Screamadelica at his 11 o'clock tea break beside a lake in Brazil gave him the record's theme, coming out of the dark into the light. He is open about depression, which for years he did not acknowledge: just after OK Computer he could buy a terraced house in Oxford and wondered why he was so unhappy.

He calls himself the mum of the band, and thinks Radiohead should work like Miles Davis's bands, coming together when they are inspired. Johnny Marr, met on a plane from Sydney to Auckland for Neil Finn's Seven Worlds Collide in 2001, has been like an older brother, and O'Brien used to imagine being called up as the Smiths' Craig Gannon if they ever re-formed. When Kid A went to number one in America, a man from Billboard told him it was the weirdest number one record he had ever heard.