Ed O'Brien on Apple Music

Zane Lowe and Ed O'Brien first met at South Park in Oxford in 2001, when Beck supported Radiohead, and O'Brien is amused to be reminded that the band opened their homecoming gig with “Creep” after years of leaving it alone.

Lowe puts it to him that Blue Morpho was made in a bad stretch, handed over, and released long enough afterwards that the person promoting it is no longer the person who made it. O'Brien takes that up. He describes the oddness of hearing a song in a green room in Los Angeles that came out of somewhere small and dark three years earlier, and says plainly that he is in a good place now.

He talks about how fixed the roles in a band become over decades and how hard it is to stretch out of one, and lights up about hearing Thom Yorke play bass again, remembering him carrying one onto the school bus at 14. Stepping outside the band, he suggests, is what let him see its chemistry clearly.