Ed O'Brien on J-Wave

Ed O'Brien talks to Yukino Nagai of J-WAVE's Sunny Vibes over a video call from his office in Wales. This is the whole conversation as J-WAVE posted it, in English with Japanese subtitles; the programme on 18 August aired a shorter cut with a translation over it, on a day when the show's theme was how people tune themselves. It is nearly ten at night in Tokyo, and the station notes that it was recorded before the Japanese shows were announced.

He is warm about Japan, where the band toured within a year of their first album in 1993, and says what has grown in him with age is a recognition of the reverence for nature in the culture there. He was about to visit Kyoto for the first time.

About Blue Morpho he goes back to the period of darkness behind it, which he insists was not a bad place but a necessary one. Lockdown removed the option of running anywhere, and he needed to sit with everything to do with his childhood. He shut himself in a small room with a guitar as therapy rather than composition, recorded the fragments that emerged on his phone, and came out the other side holding a pile of them.

He also explains tuning to 432 hertz, slightly below the standard, which he finds calmer and more grounded. Musicians at first thought he had lost his mind or gone new age, he says, and others have since done the same.

The full version keeps what the broadcast had no room for. Shabaka Hutchings came in for an afternoon to play on “The Thin Places” after the two met at Glastonbury and talked about flutes tuned to 432 hertz, and O'Brien gave him no direction at all. A microphone outside the open studio window caught the song thrush heard on the title track while he recorded the guitar. He names Takagi Masakatsu's 2014 album Kagayaki, which Riley McIntyre played him as the work began, as a record that shaped this one. And he says Radiohead now plan about 20 shows a year, with North America, South America, Australia and Japan still to come.

Radiohead, he says, are old and familiar and full of deep friendship, and this is entirely unknown territory where he is not only a guitarist, which he thinks matters more as he gets older.