Ed O'Brien says he played the picked acoustic part on “Street Spirit”

In Radiohead the picked acoustic parts belong to Thom Yorke, Ed O'Brien tells Amit Sharma in a long Total Guitar interview published on Guitar World on 9 June, because Yorke writes his songs on an acoustic guitar and plays them himself. That is why the folk-leaning acoustic playing on O'Brien's solo album, Earth, never had a place in the band. Street Spirit (Fade Out) is the only thing I can think of which he had written but I played.¹ Why the arpeggio fell to him, he cannot remember.

The band will make another record. It will definitely happen, but when that is, I have no idea¹ A Moon Shaped Pool was largely old songs, he says, which is why it can sound like different eras of the band.

When they made OK Computer everyone wanted The Bends part two, and the same happened with Kid A. The band turned left because they had done one thing and wanted to move on, he says, and being different was never the point. We liked the idea of being the Stanley Kubrick of bands.¹ Radiohead never tried to be the biggest band in the world, only the best, and some who loved Pablo Honey, The Bends and OK Computer did not take to Kid A.

Of his own songs, “Banksters” is the angriest on Earth and the nearest to Radiohead around The Bends or OK Computer. Johnny Marr once told him not to be scared of sounding like himself.

With three guitarists in one band, a player has to find the frequencies nobody else is using, which is where his Whammy pedals and capos come in. The band grew tired of the wall-to-wall distortion of the 1990s and came to value space, and most of what sounds like synths on “Brasil” is multi-tracked sustainer guitars. The guitar to me is a bit like an oscillator on a synthesizer, it's the start of a sound rather than the sound in itself.¹