Ed O'Brien on ARTE

Ed O'Brien sits down with Kim Gordon and with Isaac Wood and Tyler Hyde of Black Country, New Road for Echoes with Jehnny Beth on ARTE, after each has played. It is his sixth show with his own band. Thom Yorke went to art college, O'Brien says, and the most important thing he was taught there was to keep a notebook; Gordon owns a stack of notebooks with two lines in each. One of them used to trust the Lennon and McCartney rule that an idea worth having sticks in the head, and was left with nothing as good as “Yesterday”. Black Country, New Road took their name from Wikipedia's random article button.

In 1988, O'Brien says, taste was ghettoised, and admitting to an Abba song from childhood meant shame. Radiohead, from the age of 16, became his backbone whatever happened at home or with a girl. Sonic Youth, Gordon's band, were a huge influence, and seeing them with Pavement at Brixton Academy in 1992 was almost religious, and he reckons Radiohead's three guitarists all bought distortion pedals in homage.

After OK Computer he was depressed, though they loved the record and it was recognised, and he found he had to go inward. Brazil gave his album Earth its warmth, against the cerebral, zipped-up Oxford he grew up in, and “Brasil” borrows Carl Sagan's pale blue dot. Gordon tells how the no wave bands in New York showed her she could do it too, and that “Hungry Baby” is about the same harassment she wrote about in “Swimsuit Issue” nearly 30 years before.