Journey to the centre of himself
Ed O’brien of Radiohead didn’t feel inspired to write solo material until a few years ago, but his creative juices have now found an outlet on new album Earth, he tells Nick Duerden
It is a balmy afternoon in early April and Ed O’brien is at home in Wales, looming over his laptop’s camera, his face filling my screen like something worth commemorating on Mount Rushmore. The Radiohead guitarist is a tall man – 6ft 4in – so any standard PC would struggle to contain him.
He is here to talk about his debut solo album, Earth, under the moniker EOB, and as he talks, his mouth fusses with a toothpick – sucking it, chewing it, moving it from side to side – in the ruminative fashion of a cowboy.
For someone who thinks he recently had coronavirus (and insists he isn’t yet fully over it), the 51-year-old looks in disarmingly good health.
“It was never life-threatening,” he says, “and I never got tested because I didn’t want to take up people’s time. But I did have a lot of the symptoms, and it felt like a really heavy dose of flu. It got better, but then I regressed a little. It’s still here, I think, a bit.”
The side project of august rock stars is in many ways one of the great inevitabilities in the world of music. Various members of The Rolling Stones have moonlighted, whether we have wanted them to or not, likewise more current acts such as Blur, The White Stripes and Arctic Monkeys.
Career-defining groups often find themselves on extended hiatuses – collective creative juices need to stew before bringing back to the boil, after all – so what else is a guitarist or drummer to do with such an embarrassment of downtime but enter the studio alone in pursuit of the muse?
Three of Radiohead’s five members have to date dipped their toes – singer Thom Yorke, drummer Philip Selway, and guitarist Jonny Greenwood (bassist Colin Greenwood has remained conspicuously silent) – so Ed O’brien is a little behind the curve.
“The last thing the world needed from me was a shit album,” he reasons, “and I never wanted to make one for the sake of it. The key thing was inspiration; until 2012, I never really felt inspired.”
That inspiration came when he moved with his family to Brazil in that year. Born and raised in the Home Counties, he suggests he always felt more drawn to the South American climate, its music and culture.
“Me coming from Oxford, well, Brazil is the very antithesis of that. It’s warm, heartcentred, very emotional and has a lot of love, joy and ease. The place just feels so alive. Being in Brazil allowed me to shed my skin, to step fully into the me that was me.”
Though he loved it there, the family returned to the UK in 2013, specifically to rural Wales, by which time O’brien was filled with a creative fire.
Employing the services of producer Flood (New Order, U2) and various session musicians, he started recording in earnest, but then Radiohead announced that they were to start work on a new album, 2016’s A Moon Shaped Pool, forcing O’brien to put the solo project abruptly on hold.
“In life, and in creativity, there are moments that are quite hard to recapture, which is why you have to capture them when the time is right,” he says. “But I was lucky. I held on to it.”
He was able to resume working on Earth in 2018, now collaborating with musicians including Portishead’s Adrian Utley, and duetting with Laura Marling on Cloak of the Night, the haunting closing track that sounds a world away, in both style and approach, from the opener, Shangri-la, which throbs with febrile funk.
The track Olympik sounds like U2 circa 1993’s Zooropa album, while elsewhere the record is winsome and reflective.
He has described the songs as being about, “love, your family in the immediate, and the wider sense, where we are on the planet, the bigger picture, life and death; about endings and beginnings, being in a dark place and emerging into the light.” Perhaps consequently, it all sounds very little like his day band, and the whole project, he suggests, has set him free, helping him to find his true voice at last.
“Truth is the key factor of creativity, and I really feel like I’ve found my truth with this
music. When you’ve been a part of a band, that doesn’t always happen,” he says. “Radiohead is very much Thom’s songs, and Thom’s lyrics. OK, I might do some arranging and writing every now and then, but it’s essentially what Thom wants. So for me, being in Radiohead is a supportive role, a collaborative one.”
For the first ten years of Radiohead’s life, they were predominantly a guitar band, briefly defined by their 1992 hit, Creep, a post-nirvana anthem for the anxious, but their ambition quickly grew, and their 1997 album OK Computer is routinely, and rightly, consideredoneofrockmusic’s greatest.
But ever since 2000’s Kid
A, they have become more and more avant-garde, and increasingly the singular vision of its frontman. When I ask O’brien if this was frustrating, he shakes his head.
“No. I’m not like George Harrison in The Beatles, who probably did feel stifled. Radiohead has been such an allconsuming, creatively fantastic place. Of course, it has its issues, it’s like family, and it’s not a creative utopia, but I have never felt stifled.
“But doing this, a solo project, with me singing the songs, that is new to me, and it’s completely out of my comfort zone. But I had this feeling, this energy, that I wanted to express, to make music with one foot in the world of reality, the other in the spirit world – the magical realism of, say, Gabriel Garcia Márquez.”
Radiohead, by comparison, is more George Orwell. I ask him whether he misses the band when he isn’t in it.
“No. They’re like my brothers, and we’re like family – it’s great getting together at Christmas and Easter, but do I want to live in that house all the time? No!”
And when they do get together, the individual members never discuss their solo projects. “That would be like introducing your old girlfriend to your new girlfriend,” he laughs. “But Radiohead is very established, and that’s very freeing. When you’ve been making music together for 30-odd years, it gets harder and harder to find new forms, and different inspirations. You can still get it, but it’s no longer quite the same voyage of discovery. That’s a very natural thing – it’s neither good nor bad, happy nor sad. It is what it is.”
He plans for Earth to be the first album in a trilogy. “Some people are going to be curious, and I know I’ve got a chance here to make an impression. The only way I will get better at doing this is by doing more and more of it.”
He swivels the toothpick from one corner of his mouth to the other, then pulls it out with a couple of probing fingers, unsurprised to see that it is now half the size it was when we first started talking. I can see fragments of it on his tongue.
“Music, family and friends is really all I ever wanted to fill my life with, and music now more than ever,” he says. “This is a new journey for me. I’m enjoying it.”
Doing this, a solo project, with me singing the songs, that is new to me, and it’s completely out of my comfort zone. But I had this feeling, this energy, that I wanted to express