Ed O'Brien on Popload Music

Ed O'Brien speaks to an audience in Brazil, beside two people he names as Luciana and Francisco, about what the country has done for him. He found Brazilian music during OK Computer, when the band got very big and he felt empty, starting with Jobim and Tropicália. A profound spiritual experience there in 2002 woke him up. Later he took a year out with his wife and their children, then five and seven, who went to a village school where nobody spoke English, and in the Atlantic forest he felt alive after 20 years in London. Carnival in Rio and the Mangueira samba school did the rest, and his solo album, Earth, has a track called “Brasil”. In the second lockdown he went to a dark place, as the ghosts of a childhood he had spent his life running from caught up with him, and he healed in the hills of Wales. He has just finished another record, about the power of nature.