Ed O'Brien on BBC Radio 6

Nemone, a practising psychotherapist as well as a broadcaster, gives Ed O'Brien most of an hour on Journeys in Sound, her 6 Music series of long conversations about what music has done for the people who make it. He says he is in a good place, some 25 years into what he calls a healing journey, and describes himself as a seeker trying to be whole.

Blue Morpho goes back to the second lockdown, in London, when he fell into a hole. He had stopped drinking and looked after himself for years, but realised he had kept busy all his life to outrun the ghosts of his childhood, and in the lockdown, with nowhere to go and nothing to do, they caught up with him. Gabor Maté's book When the Body Says No helped him see it. A cold shower bought him about three hours of energy each morning, which he spent playing guitar in a tiny room with almost no windows while the children were home-schooled. The album's opening riff came out of those sessions, capo on the fourth fret and the guitar tuned down a semitone. The dark spell lasted nine or ten months, and he looks back on it as a beautiful time.

He made the record with Paul Epworth and Riley McIntyre, and notices that he always ends up making records with people he loves. Epworth, like Flood, who made O'Brien's first solo album, Earth, was another father at O'Brien's children's school, and Dave Okumu brought his band in to colour the new record in. He let life into the sessions, cancelling work to help his children through their A-levels, and met Tõnu Kõrvits, the Estonian composer who arranged the strings, at a dinner in Estonia. One track tries to recreate a night alone in the Dartmoor woods, at the psilocybin camp he has shared with a group of friends every year for about 20 years.

His parents were both osteopaths and unhappily married, and his was the second family in his class to divorce. Music was his refuge: Simon and Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Water on the floor while his mother cut out sewing patterns, a Beatles obsession from eight to eleven, “Paperback Writer” played over and over. The habit he learned there of making sure everyone else was all right, he says, came with him into Radiohead.

He first heard Marvin Gaye's What's Going On in 1995, when the band's gear was stolen on the American tour. Driving seven hours to San Francisco to hire guitars, they had one cassette, Swervedriver's Ejector Seat Reservation on one side and Gaye on the other, and some of what he took from it went into his sounds on OK Computer.

Five years ago he thought he had played his last Radiohead show. The first rehearsal back, on a Thursday morning in 2024, at Epworth's church studio in Crouch End, began with “Planet Telex”, and by lunchtime they knew it was still there. Twenty shows is as many as they can give, he says, and he cried through much of the 2025 tour. Talking about the teenagers he saw in tears at the last chorus of “Let Down”, he runs out of words.

His toolbox is meditation he taught himself about 20 years ago, half an hour every morning, with movement, cold water and three things written down each day that he is grateful for. The closing track, “Obrigado”, came from an interest in near-death experiences, imagining being thankful at the moment of dying, and from his love of Brazil. For a song that makes him feel better he picks “Águas de Março” by Elis Regina and Tom Jobim.