Ed O'Brien on BBC Radio 6

Ed O'Brien talks to Steve Lamacq on the phone on the weekend he would have been camping at Glastonbury with friends, after the virus knocked him out for a while. He thinks he got six shows of his own in before the lockdown, well out of his comfort zone, and at the 6 Music night at the Roundhouse “Brasil” went off enough to give him a taste of how it could be. His solo album, Earth, came out during the lockdown and went top 20, though he says Radiohead stopped paying attention to chart positions years ago.

His wife hears his music first, then his father, 79, whose view of Pablo Honey was that it had one good song, “Creep”. With The Bends he came back the next day: “I love this record, you've really moved up.” After OK Computer O'Brien heard nothing from him for about a week, then came a very drunken message on the answerphone calling it a masterpiece.

His first Glastonbury, in 1990, the year he graduated from Manchester, was Apocalypse Now. The Happy Mondays were shambolic, his self-esteem was low, and the saving grace was watching the Cure from the hill on the Saturday night. Radiohead played at two in the afternoon in the sun in 1994. In 1997 the monitors failed at the biggest gig they had done. None of them could hear, and O'Brien saw his job as keeping Thom Yorke all right so they would not walk off. The first, and probably the only, moment of euphoria came when Yorke asked the lighting designer, Andy, to turn the lights on the crowd, and they saw how many people were out there. They came off thinking they had blown it. For 2017 they pretended it wasn't important while each of them thought about it for six weeks, and he admits “there is a tendency in Radiohead to be wilfully perverse”.