Ed O'Brien

Ed O'Brien picks up with Exit Music, an Argentinian Radiohead site that last spoke to him, with Phil Selway, in 2018.

South America is the thread. He has lived in Brazil, says touring there is always a highlight, and explains why 2018 mattered to him. Much of Earth had been conceived in Brazil years earlier, the songs dated from 2012 and 2013, and he had lost touch with the feeling that produced them. Being back reconnected him to it, and that feeling, he says, is what a song actually comes from.

He is affectionate about the differences between audiences and insists each country has an identity a band can feel from the stage. Brazilian crowds carry something of samba, and the Argentinians, Chileans and Peruvians each have their own. Colombia was new to them, and he stayed on afterwards with his family to visit Cartagena, as a devoted reader of García Márquez.

The other half is lockdown, which turned him back into the country boy he was raised as. With everything quiet he heard birdsong properly for the first time and set about learning it, and he reports with some pride that he can now tell a wren from a robin from a blackbird.