Ed O'Brien remembers making OK Computer, 25 years on

Ed O'Brien has written a long note on 25 years of OK Computer, in two Instagram posts on 20 May, the eve of the anniversary of its first release, in Japan on 21 May 1997. Stereogum has his note. He wrote it for BBC 6 Music's day celebrating the album and 1997.

The band built a mobile studio of their own and co-produced the record with Nigel Godrich, whom O'Brien credits with a beautiful job on what he believes was his first production work. Instead of conventional studios they chose places that might inspire them, and he writes that one space was nicknamed canned applause… it was literally inside a vast metal box for storing apples¹. Another was St Catherine's Court, the actress Jane Seymour's manor house near Bath.

He remembers them as young and driven, with no partying, and listening a long way from guitar music: Bitches Brew, What's Going On, Pet Sounds, Scott Walker, Massive Attack, Portishead. They played the songs in before the album was out, opening for Alanis Morissette in North America in 1996, and he thanks her for choosing them; that's where we first met the light that was Taylor Hawkins¹, he writes. Hawkins, her drummer then and the Foo Fighters' since, died on 25 March.

Of the 1997 Glastonbury headline set, and what came after it, he writes then there was Glastonbury … dreams coming true .. darkness also.. you think these things will fix you .. they don't .. that work comes later¹.