Ed O'Brien on Apple Music

Zane Lowe talks to Ed O'Brien for Apple Music about Blue Morpho, and starts in Oxford in 2001, at the South Park homecoming with Beck in support, when, as Lowe remembers it, Radiohead opened with “Creep” after years without it; in fact it closed the night. It would have been churlish not to play it, O'Brien says.

The record came out of a depression. In the 2021 lockdown, with the children homeschooling, meditation and a cold shower gave him a three-hour window each morning, and he spent it in a tiny room with a guitar, recording whatever caught him and never listening back. After about nine months he had some 60 motifs to go through with Paul Epworth. The title song came together in one pass at his studio in Wales on a summer's day, with a microphone out of the window for the birds. A song by a band he loved, heard on 6 Music in the sixth week of the first lockdown, finished his patience with verse and chorus.

He knew after A Moon Shaped Pool that he was done with the band, and says so plainly. Making Kid A he was smoking a lot of spliff and taking herbal antidepressants. The friendship came back at Jonny Greenwood's 50th, standing round a fire with Thom Yorke. When the band finally met, after nearly six years without playing together, in Epworth's church studio in Crouch End, all there by five to 11 on a Thursday morning, they started with “Planet Telex” and were through The Bends and OK Computer by lunch. The five of them played like one organism. In the Smile he loved hearing Yorke on bass again; the first time he saw him at school, Yorke was carrying one onto the bus, aged 14.

Would he be content if A Moon Shaped Pool were the last Radiohead album? “Yeah.”