Ed O'Brien on Tape Notes

Ed O'Brien and Flood take John Kennedy's Tape Notes through three songs from Earth, sitting with the session files at Assault & Battery in north-west London. The songs came out of Ed's time living in Brazil and arrived in a rush back home in 2013. He had demos for 11 or 12 by 2014, just as Radiohead went in to make A Moon Shaped Pool, so it was autumn 2017 before he and Flood started. Their children were at the same school. Flood heard one of the demos come up at random on his iTunes, didn't recognise it and rang Ed. Ed had been fishing for him, and it was the first record Flood had made with a friend.

“Brasil” began as a pastoral song in five four, written in a rented cottage in Wales, that blows up into the trance of the samba parades Ed saw at carnival in Rio. Colin Greenwood came in one afternoon to play bass on the demo; the next time he couldn't, so Ed played it and found he loved the bass. Flood built the record on top of the demos rather than replacing them, and told Ed to stop his singing lessons and sing out of time and out of tune. With a house band of Omar Hakim, Nathan East and David Okumu in a big house in Wales, Ed found within two hours that he had to give instructions, because nobody else could hear the sound in his head. “Brasil” was finished last, after Ed played the mixes to his wife and friends and heard what was wrong.

“Olympik” is spelt for 808 State's “Cubik”. Its tune came to Ed in a hotel room in Iceland on a Radiohead tour, and the band caught it on the eighth day in Wales, on take four at one in the afternoon, before Flood's train home. Johnny Marr once told Ed not to be scared to sound shit. “Long Time Coming” belongs to the quieter side of the album, closer to Radiohead's ground, and in the end they set out to make a pop record.