Ed O'Brien says Radiohead's next album could be three years off or ten

Radiohead have no plan, Ed O'Brien tells Craig McLean in a long interview for The Face, published today as his solo album Earth is announced. After 35 years the band will make music when all of them want to, not because a contract says so, and they have made two albums in ten years because members have wanted to do other things. We might not make an album for 10 years, or we might make one in three years. I don't know, it has to be right.¹ Whatever it is, Thom Yorke has to be part of it.

Asked whether 2021 is a Radiohead year, he offers maybe a couple of shows. The band are not playing together, but they meet every two or three months, and there is an idea of trying to do some.

The closest Radiohead came to ending, he says, was sequencing Kid A. The tracklisting was so fraught that he thought the band might not survive it. That felt like it could go either way, it could break. Like it would snap and that would be it.¹ They came in the next day and it was settled.

O'Brien had depression for years and dealt with it long ago. It deepened on the OK Computer tour; the summer of 1998, at home in Oxford, was the lowest he has been, and it ran on into Kid A with a lot of drugs. He took no antidepressants and tried therapy only briefly. Johnny Marr gave him Aldous Huxley's The Perennial Philosophy and helped him find a place to start again, without drink or drugs.

In the early days he was something like Yorke's older brother. I always say that he was like the dad of the band and I'm the mum.¹ Until In Rainbows, Yorke mostly brought in a demo, sometimes worked up first with Jonny Greenwood, and the others wrote their own parts around it.

He first thought someone else should sing Earth, possibly Yorke, until Flood's certainty that he could do it himself won him round. The band don't send each other their solo work unless asked. Colin Greenwood has heard “Brasil” and likes the bass, Phil Selway asked for the album and was sent it, and Yorke has not asked. On the next Radiohead album, O'Brien suggests with a smile, he might sing four songs.