Radiohead to play 20 shows a year from 2027, says Ed O'Brien

Ed O'Brien has told Simon Vozick-Levinson of Rolling Stone that Radiohead will play 20 shows a year from 2027, each year on a different continent. The interview is out as he announces his second solo album, Blue Morpho. What we're going to do is, every year we're going to do a different continent, and we're going to do 20 shows each year. No more, no less.¹

The cap is there so that they can give everything every night and never run on empty. We're not spring chickens anymore.¹ Nothing will happen this year. North America, South America and Asia with Oceania are being considered; no dates or cities have been named, and a band representative had nothing to add when Variety asked. O'Brien calls last year's 20 concerts in five European cities emotional and profound for all five of them.

It is a long way from where he stood when the tour ended in the summer of 2018. He wanted to do his own thing and believed Radiohead had run out of inspiration. I was done with Radiohead. It had got to a place where I just wasn't enjoying it.¹ The A Moon Shaped Pool sessions had been hard, and he toured that record only because the others wanted to, though he is glad now that he did.

From about 1990 to 2018 Radiohead were hardly ever off the road, which he calls addictive and unhealthy, and when it stopped the ghosts caught up with him. After Earth, released as EOB in April 2020, he fell into a deep depression, the first time in his life he had had to stop. He wanted no medication or conventional therapy; his therapy was three hours of guitar every morning while the children did their schoolwork at home, and walks in the Welsh hills with his dog, Ziggy. The break frightened him, and part of him enjoyed thinking the band were finished. Then in 2024 the five met in a rehearsal room. We hadn't played together for six years. We're like, 'How do we know if we're going to be any good?' And the chemistry was there from the very beginning.¹

Blue Morpho, the first album under his own name, is out on 22 May, produced by Paul Epworth. It is named after a butterfly he saw while his family lived in Brazil in the early 2010s. Phil Selway drums on two tracks, the title track among them; Shabaka Hutchings plays flute and Dave Okumu guitar. A short film shot in Wales, Blue Morpho: The Three Act Play, will come out with the album. “Teachers” came out of a night on psilocybin during a three-day woodland retreat he makes with friends on Dartmoor every year. The opener, “Incantations”, was one of the first songs he wrote, when he felt lost in a labyrinth, and he ties it to the Theseus myth that ran through the artwork of Amnesiac.

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