Ed O'Brien

Ed O'Brien drops in on a FaceTime call with Tim and Dee Frost and their son Odin in Tyler, east Texas, a family he got to know through direct messages. Tim tells him he grew up in a satanic cult, was homeless from 13 to 16 and met Dee just before he turned 17. Dee fell for Radiohead when Tim played her “Karma Police” in the car, and Odin's first Radiohead show was in Houston, when Dee was pregnant with him.

O'Brien had loving parents, he says, but it was grim at times. They split up in 1977, and in friends' houses he saw how warm a home could be. He has a Texas connection too. His grandmother was born in Nuevo Laredo and moved to Fort Worth at eight, and in 1981 he stayed with family friends in San Antonio, where a 16-year-old drove him to high school in a Pontiac Firebird Trans Am and one of the lessons was bowling. Fresh from a dry all-boys school, he wondered how he could stay.

About 20 years ago a New York cab driver, a lecturer at NYU who drove a cab two days a week because he liked meeting people, asked what one thing he would take with him. A video camera, the driver said, so that great-grandchildren could see him alive. O'Brien's mother shot Super 8 from the late 60s until 1977, and she has just given him a bag of about 40 reels, sent off three weeks ago to be converted. He expects to be a blubbering wreck by the end.