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 Friday 28 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 Radiohead first toured in 1994, the year after their first album, and says what has grown in him with age is a recognition of the reverence for nature in the culture there. He is going to Kyoto for the first time next year.

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 now James Blake and Ziggy Marley record at 432 too.

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, who engineered and co-produced the record, 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 Blue Morpho is entirely unknown territory where he is not only a guitarist, which he thinks matters more as he gets older.