Ed O'Brien on ARTE

On an episode of Echoes with Jehnny Beth, Ed O'Brien sits with Kim Gordon and with Isaac Wood and Tyler Hyde of Black Country, New Road, and the four talk across generations rather than in separate slots.

He is there for Earth, his first solo record, and the introduction frames it the way he tends to himself, as his own voice arrived at after a long road through a band and a stretch of self-doubt.

Most of it is about method. They argue over whether a good idea has to be caught at once or can be trusted to stick, and over the Lennon and McCartney rule that anything good enough to keep stays in the head, which one of them followed faithfully and found left them with nothing. Phones, notebooks and art-school habits all come up, and the notebook is defended as the single most useful thing anyone was taught.

They also talk about permission. Taste in the late 1980s was ghettoised, a record collection was the Smiths, Sonic Youth and the Pixies, and admitting to liking a pure pop song from childhood was not done. Now referencing pop openly costs nothing.