Ed O'Brien tells São Paulo how Brazilian music healed him

Ed O'Brien told a climate panel at SIM São Paulo, the city's international music week, on Wednesday that he first fell for Brazilian music in the OK Computer years, when success did not fill the hole. We became very popular, very big, but I felt empty.¹

He found Jorge Ben, João Gilberto, Tom Jobim, Os Mutantes and Tropicália, music that came from the heart, he said, and healed him. He began coming to Brazil with his wife, and in 2002 had a very deep spiritual experience there. I felt as if I had been asleep, I woke up, and we kept coming back.¹

When his children were young he told the band he would take a break to live in Brazil, and the children went to a small school without a word of Portuguese. Back in the countryside after 20 years in London, among the Atlantic forest, its birds and its butterflies, he felt alive again and started writing and making music.

The panel, “Sem Clima, Sem Show” (No Climate, No Show), was at the Memorial da América Latina on 19 February, with the Ashaninka leader Francisco Piyãko and the scientist Luciana Gatti, and Rodrigo Cunha of TEDx Amazônia in the chair. O'Brien called Brazil an incredibly powerful place for its nature, with the Amazon literally the lungs of the world. He does not think of himself as an activist, he said, but everyone has a responsibility to the planet, and music can make people aware of it.

Two days later he gave a talk and masterclass for CULTSP PRO, the São Paulo state government's culture schools, to more than 150 people at the Edifício Oswald de Andrade in the city centre. Ruth Daniel of In Place of War, a UK charity working with music and art in places of conflict, shared the session, and she and O'Brien swapped stories with Brazilian musicians, many of them from the city's outskirts. Of Radiohead's beginnings he said they weren't very good at first; they didn't party, they practised to get better, and became a family.

His first words were Music saved me.³ He grew up in a home full of conflict that ended in his parents' separation, and the guitar became his companion and refuge.