Ed O'Brien recalls the borrowed PA behind his club night with Thom Yorke

Ed O'Brien spent the summer of 1989 running a club night in Oxford on a PA borrowed from his halls of residence in Manchester. He tells The University of Manchester Magazine that he drove the Owens Park system down in a Transit van, having said it was going off to be serviced. With Thom Yorke as his roadie, he hired the upstairs room of a pub, flyered the town, and sold the night out ten weeks in a row.

O'Brien, who took his economics degree at Manchester in 1990, was talking to Thomas Fern for the August issue from his home in the hills of Wales. As social secretary at Owens Park he booked the bands for the halls, and once, trying to get New Order's Peter Hook to DJ, he rang Factory Records and ended up on the phone to Rob Gretton, the group's manager, for about 40 minutes. That, he says, is how he learnt the music industry. His stone on the university's Bicentenary Way, laid in 2024, pleased him more, he says, than any music award.

He also goes back to the report Radiohead commissioned in 2006 on the impact of their North American touring. The band already refused private jets, and O'Brien expected their own travel to be the biggest part. The audit came back and said the band is responsible for 15% of the carbon footprint. The truth is that the biggest carbon footprint comes from the audience.¹ They had avoided arenas before, and from then on looked for venues people could reach by public transport.