Ed O'Brien on Adam Buxton Podcast

Adam Buxton, a friend of 15 years, talks to Ed O'Brien at Universal's offices in King's Cross in early March 2020, days before the pandemic was declared and a month before Earth, his first record as EOB, came out. Buxton came round to Radiohead through a 1996 tape from Louis Theroux with the whole of The Bends on one side.

They go through the early videos. O'Brien proudly showed his dad the turkeys and feather boas of “Anyone Can Play Guitar”, and his dad laughed. For “Stop Whispering” a director in Los Angeles explained that a man in an old diving suit would stand for the song's alienation. After Pablo Honey they built a mystique on purpose, looking west to Massive Attack and Portishead, partly out of self-preservation. Meeting People Is Easy is one view, he says, since its director, Grant Gee, tended to turn up when they were miserable, and O'Brien's own Kid A studio diary was written to show there was no sorcery going on.

For Earth, the perspective was music from space: he was obsessed with how music might sound from there. Taking his children to a NASA film about the Hubble repair, he recognised the astronaut who fixes it, Mike Massimino, whom he had met backstage in 2012, when Massimino showed him a photo of himself in the shuttle with the copy of In Rainbows his daughter had asked him to take up. The record's working title was Pale Blue Dot, after Carl Sagan. Buxton reads out David Fricke's 2010 list in Rolling Stone with O'Brien at 59, above Neil Young and David Gilmour. He calls himself the band's sweeper, somewhere between rhythm and sound, and says he has always felt a little inferior as a player to Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood, which is why Brian Eno meant so much to him. He nearly didn't make the record at all, and had dark nights over it. “If I didn't do it I wouldn't be me.”