Ed O'Brien on Jenny Eliscu

Ed O'Brien talks to Jenny Eliscu for episode 142 of her LSQ podcast, after Blue Morpho came out. He starts with 432 hertz, the tuning he has been chasing for about 10 years. For this record he had his piano and a vintage electric piano tuned to it, and on the first day of A Moon Shaped Pool he told the others they had to make the album at 432. The birdsong on “Blue Morpho” was recorded with the acoustic guitar at his house in Wales, and the louder the birds got, the better the track sounded.

The record came out of nine or 10 months he calls his dark night of the soul, when his ritual was three hours a day alone in a small room playing guitar, as a kind of therapy. Only at the end did he notice he had a pile of motifs.

His mother made her own dresses with Bridge Over Troubled Water on the record player. He sang in a boys' choir until he was about 12, then, at a new school at 13, faked his voice test because the choir was uncool. In 2003 the head of music, Terry James, came to see Radiohead after a gig in Cardiff and was given a gold disc. He told O'Brien “Edward, I didn't know you could sing.” O'Brien owned up to faking the test, and James told him he should have been in the chamber choir. He wanted to play guitar from the moment he heard the Police's “Walking on the Moon”.

In 1995 Radiohead's gear was stolen from a van in Denver. O'Brien, Colin and Jonny Greenwood and two of the crew drove to San Francisco to buy replacement guitars, with one cassette in the van, Swervedriver's Ejector Seat Reservation on one side and Marvin Gaye's What's Going On on the other. He had never heard What's Going On, and he counts it among the reasons OK Computer has more air in it.