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Ed O'Brien to make a solo album, born of a year in Brazil
Ed O'Brien will make a solo album next year, he told Matt Everitt on The First Time with Ed O'Brien, an hour on BBC 6 Music first broadcast on Sunday 9 October.
I haven't up until two years ago but I am going to now. I'm gonna do one next year.
Ed O'Brien3
He joked about the cliché that goes with it, the guitarist on a mountaintop with a Les Paul and his hair blowing.
It began in Brazil. After the touring for The King of Limbs, O'Brien told the others that he and his wife were going to live there for a year, and that if the band needed to make a record without him, they should. The family lived on a small farm deep in the countryside, in a hut no bigger, he says, than a room. The children, born in 2004 and 2006, went to the local school, where nobody spoke English, and picked up the language.
Each day he walked up a hill to another small hut, by a lake, to write. He had taken recording gear, because Thom Yorke had told him he was good at the ProTools side of things. After about eight weeks he decided that what he was making was rubbish, and that all he wanted was to play guitar.
That February a close friend took him and his wife to carnival at the Sambadrome in Rio de Janeiro. Twelve samba schools paraded over two nights, each for an hour and 20 minutes down a strip about a mile long. What struck him was the bateria, the drum sections with their polyrhythms, and the singing: he reckons about 4,000 people parade with each school, and every one of them sings. It was the greatest thing I've ever, ever, ever experienced in terms of music.
1 It has fed everything he has written since. There is joy in the new music, he says, with a dark, melancholy heart under it, as in a lot of Brazilian music. He calls the year a watershed in his life.
Everitt also asked about the songs Radiohead recorded at Jack White's Third Man studio in Nashville, by White's account the day before they headlined Bonnaroo in June 2012. It was a session White confirmed that July and hoped would one day come out. O'Brien enjoyed the day, with White recording everything on eight-track, but can hardly remember the music and rates it as all right. Listen, it's not worth waiting for. If anything was amazing, you can be sure - we'd try and put it out.
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