Ed O'Brien on J-Wave

Filmed at home for a Japanese radio interview, Ed O'Brien is careful to point out that he is in the office, not the music room, which is 30 yards away. This is where the calls happen, the bills get paid and the filing is done, beside photograph albums from the 1970s and 1980s that include the band when they were very young.

Yukino Nagai asks him directly about the depression he went through during the pandemic, and his answer resists the framing. It was a dark place, he says, but not a bad one to be in, and a necessary one. A lifetime of being busy had made stillness impossible, and the stopping forced him to sit with the thing he needed to address, his childhood.

The routine that came out of it was three minutes under a cold shower to wake himself up, then into a small room with a guitar, playing as therapy rather than composition, with the musical motifs emerging only as a by-product.

He ends on his own trade. Music, he says, is at bottom mathematical intervals arranged in patterns, and those patterns can still carry a very strong human feeling.