Ed O'Brien tells Tokyo radio he will see Kyoto next year

Ed O'Brien was the guest on J-Wave's Sunny Vibes in Tokyo on Friday 28 August, and told listeners he is going to Kyoto for the first time next year. He spoke to the presenter, Yukino Nagai, from his office in Wales. The interview went out a fortnight after a Radiohead teaser on the Summer Sonic screens ended on the words “TOKYO 2027”.

He has always loved going to Japan, he says, old Japan in particular. He remembers Radiohead touring there within about a year of their first album. Their first shows there were at the Club Quattro venues in Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya in June 1994. He praised shinrin-yoku, the Japanese practice of forest bathing, and says a modern life that never stops is bad for us without time in nature.

The dark period behind Blue Morpho was one he needed, O'Brien says. After a lifetime of being busy came stillness, and with it time to face his childhood, cold showers, and a guitar he took up as a kind of therapy.

I was in a dark place, but it wasn't a bad place to be. It was a very necessary place to be.

Ed O'Brien²

The motifs he recorded on his iPhone in that time became the album, which he made with Paul Epworth and Riley MacIntyre. To him Radiohead and Blue Morpho are two different worlds. The band is old and familiar and built on a deep friendship; the solo record is new, and takes him outside his comfort zone as a singer as well as a guitarist. For O'Brien, music is essentially mathematical intervals in patterns. But those patterns and mathematical intervals can represent a very strong human emotion.²