Ed O'Brien

Ed O'Brien talks over video to Leonardo, who runs a South American Radiohead website and last interviewed him in 2018, before the band's tour there. It is December 2023, he is in London, and he is deep in his second solo record.

Earth, his first solo record, was largely conceived in Brazil, and going back in 2018 reconnected him with the feeling behind songs written in 2012 and 2013. He hears each country in its crowds, samba in the Brazilians and the Andes in the Peruvians, and after the band's first show in Colombia he took his family to Cartagena, for love of García Márquez.

The first lockdown, in the Welsh hills, was a beautiful summer. In the second he fell into a deep depression and realised he had been running all his life from the ghosts of childhood. Cold water and Wim Hof's breathing helped, and so did fasting twice a year and learning the birdsong; he can now tell a wren from a robin. He would rather that than medication: while they made Kid A he took St John's Wort, a herbal antidepressant, and came to rely on it because it numbed him; he felt scared without it.

The new record's songs came out of the second lockdown, and in that year he met the producer Paul Epworth. They spent three days in a studio with the inventor of the Circle Guitar, all three of them dads of children at the same school. Dave Okumu has put the band together and Shabaka Hutchings came in to play flute. Two years of singing lessons mean he can finally listen back to his voice, and the Paula Rego retrospective at Tate Britain showed him how he wants to work, still going into the studio every day at the end. He would like the record out by next September. Asked about the rap album listed under his name on Apple Music, he says there is no rap record.