Good morning,
It’s Monday again, and we have just the thing to get your week off to a flier as Radiohead’s Ed O’Brien takes on our Life & Times questions.
Ed hopped on Zoom with me, Niall, last week from his home in Wales. It was the day before his birthday, which I only realised afterwards, otherwise I would’ve sung him happy birthday.
Next month, Ed releases Blue Morpho, his second solo album but first under his proper name – 2020’s Earth came out under the handle of EOB. I don’t blame him for wanting to remove any doubt around who made it because it’s absolutely brilliant, seven immersive songs that elegantly shapeshift from atmospheric folk to orchestral swells to psychedelic grooves before eventually landing on a song that sounds like Pink Floyd at Rio Carnival. It packs a lot in.
Here’s a reminder that today’s edition, like every Monday, is free for all to read but if you’d like full access to every delivery, as well as our humungous archive, then you can become a paying subscriber for a bargain £5.
Cheers, enjoy the edition
Ted and Niall
The Life & Times Of… Ed O’Brien
What was the first record you loved?
I’m gonna say ELO, Out Of The Blue. That came out in ’78 so I was ten. I loved The Beatles but I didn’t love a record, I loved the greatest hits, so that was the first album I bought, gatefold, spaceship on the inner sleeve, it’s like an oratorio or something, four sides of Brummie goodness.
And the last?
Probably Samora Pinderhughes’ GRIEF.
I haven’t heard that.
Ah man, listen to it. It came out in 2022, it was a Gilles Peterson complete fave and the track GRIEF is unbelievable. If there’s ever a song that I thought was written and recorded and typified lockdown and the grief of it, it’s amazing.
What’s your earliest memory?
Probably in the back garden in Oxford, looking up at this big sky, and there was always the constant of these little planes flying around because we had a flying school about five miles outside Oxford, with the sound of birdsong too – looking up at the sky and hearing the birdsong but this very soothing calm sound of a single engine prop plane doing little circuits. That still happens in Oxford, go to north Oxford on a quiet day, you can still see it, it’s like a time capsule.
What’s your daily domestic routine?
That’s telling, isn’t it? Up at 6.30am, meditate, bit of Tai Chi, cup of tea, then I might go into the river or do some exercise, bit of breakfast. Then, ideally, I get going on playing music around ten in the morning and I do that through to the afternoon and then have some food in the evening and watch a film or watch some football. I like to keep it nice and simple these days!
What’s your worst habit?
There used to be many, of course, and you try to eradicate them as you get older for health, both physical and mental. What’s my worst habit? Oh god. I’ve got loads of them. I’m the wrong person to ask, really, because I don’t think any of them are bad but other people probably say, ‘Oh yeah, that’s what you always do, dad…’. I guess one of my worst habits may well be that I try, and I don’t know whether it’s a worst habit but I know it annoys people sometimes, even when things are challenging I try and find the positive aspect of it. That can really get on people’s tits!
That sounds like a fantastic worst habit!
OK, that’s not a worst habit, is it? I’m really the wrong person to ask this… can I come back to that one? (we forgot to come back to that one). I want to be honest because there are plenty of them…
What was your first job?
Working in a mechanic’s garage. When he worked on the cars, I’d hoover them and clean them up on the inside and outside, aged 14. I lasted about three days, he didn’t like me. I didn’t work hard enough probably, I wasn’t a natural fit.
Has anyone you’ve ever met made you feel starstruck?
Oh yeah. It’s usually guitar heroes. I remember meeting The Edge in ’97. We’d done the Free Tibet show in New York all together and they invited us to their show in Philadelphia, it was when they were doing the Pop tour. It was extraordinary, so good. And then they said, very kindly, ‘Do you want to get on the bus with us back to New York?’, cos we were all staying in New York, so we rode back on their bus and there was a lot of joints being smoked and I was pretty gung-ho in those days, I loved a puff. They were very good cos they all got to talk to us and the last person I talked to was The Edge, who was one of the reasons I got into playing guitar, and by that stage I was so stoned, I could barely get the words out. All I wanted to say was how much The Unforgettable Fire made a huge impact on me texturally and all that stuff but it all came out as this awful, obsequious drivel. I wasn’t starstruck by the others but you know when people really have an impact on your way in life and what you do, right from the early days in U2 with October, I just resonated with all that stuff he was doing.
Who or what is the greatest influence on your work?
Johnny Marr is one of them. He’s like an older brother to me, he’s so supportive and he’s a really good mate and a brother. If I think about him as a guitarist and songwriter and also somebody who’s also been a real cheerleader for me over the years, Johnny has probably had the biggest influence on me out of any musician, before I knew him and since I’ve known him.
Tell us the story of Blue Morpho.
It comes out of a dark period in my life and it’s that story of how we’re very lucky as musicians, everybody in life has these dark, challenging moments but as musicians and artists we’re fortunate in that one of the things we do is we sit in this stuff. I did, I sat in the dark and felt this and really faced a lot of fears. It’s an alchemy what we do, you can take these dark things and try to spin them into something beautiful. I think it’s extraordinary how you can take what you’re feeling and in a cluster of notes or a musical motif, you can capture a human emotion or what I’m going through. That’s it on a very basic level, that’s the story of Blue Morpho. It’s a dark period, it’s how I came out of this place, a love letter to the planet we live on. I healed and a lot of the healing came being in the woods, being in the river, walking this land, so I’ve got this massive gratitude and this connection with spirit that I feel here that I awoke to and connected with. For me, it’s a big moment in my life, very much like the metaphor of the butterfly who is a caterpillar and then becomes a cocoon, literally that physical body gets disintegrated and out of that cocoon flies a butterfly.
What do you wish the 18-year-old you knew?
Probably the thing they always say: ‘Don’t worry so much, it’ll all be OK’. We all say that. We all worry about what people think about us, we all worry about everything and that’s the passage of time, it’s beautiful, by the time you get to your mid-fifties, you don’t give a fuck what anyone thinks about you. It’s so liberating, I love it. You realise it’s OK, it’s all good.
What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given?
Johnny Marr gave me a really beautiful bit of advice about music and musicians and I really held that true. We first met and hung out when Neil Finn got us all together in New Zealand in 2001. Johnny and I spent a lot of time hanging out and riffing and talking, it was really great. He knew I was a fan of the music and he liked what I did and what Radiohead did and I realised what an amazing guy he was. He was probably in the coolest band ever but he was also one of the kindest people I’d ever met and those two things, I didn’t see go hand-in-hand much. Usually, the cooler the band – you know how it is! We were talking about bands from the 80s and he was saying how nice so-and-so was and I was saying, ‘Wow, I thought you’d never like his music’ and he said, ‘Here’s the thing Ed, you’re gonna meet a lot of people whose music you don’t like but they’re really good people and that’s way more important’.
I thought that was really cool. I think that’s really important. Also, a band like The Smiths and a band like Radiohead, I guess they’re kind of similar, a lot of musicians like these kind of bands and a lot of people who like these bands, you’re not going to resonate with their music but if they come up and say hello and say, ‘I really like it’, it’s important to know what they do and take a genuine interest in what they do.
I thought that was so fucking beautiful, cos that’s the way I was brought up, my mum was always like, ‘Do as you would be done by’, ‘Be kind to people’, but the indie-rock and Britpop world was not about kindness and being nice to people. That’s one of the reasons why we, Radiohead, stayed where we were and didn’t get immersed in the scene. It was always refreshing to go to America, to be honest, you’d meet these bands like Belly and the Pixies and they were super cool but also super-friendly. Even Massive Attack, I remember the first time when we were doing a festival together and because they were West Country, they were different, we were like, ‘Fuck, it’s Massive Attack on the side of the stage!’ and I remember D coming up and going, ‘Oh, I really like that song Creep’.
How do you spark creativity?
I think a lot of it is to do with establishing a rhythm and maintaining that. It’s like a discipline. When I get into songwriting mode, it’s about turning up at a certain time, which for me is around ten or 10.30 in the morning, much like you’re turning up for a lesson, and you work through til 5.30pm. Also, don’t expect miracles immediately. My experience of it is, you start and in that initial period you get given these little things occasionally, enough to keep you going and then you just keep doing these. For me, creativity is not something I do, it’s something that comes through me. It’s a co-creation with spirit or muse or whatever you want to call it, but spirit needs to know you’re going to be there at 10.30am through til 5.30pm. It doesn’t work for me if I’m all over the place and one day I start at 2pm, it doesn’t mean I can’t be flexible but it’s about having a parameter and repetition and turning up every day. Take the weekend off but Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, bang, and once you get into that, it’s like a spiral, it comes and it comes. Turning up is the most important thing in all of this.
What’s the bravest career decision you’ve ever made?
I don’t feel I’ve been brave at all, because I feel like everything we’ve done as a band and everything I’ve done has been driven by very strong intuitive feelings about something. Someone said yesterday about Kid A and it being a brave, bold move creatively to do that… it didn’t feel like that at all at the time, it felt like we were just trying to seek something new. I wouldn’t even say the bravest thing was to go to university and then turn your back on your degrees and do the band, I don’t think that was brave cos that’s what we were always gonna do. I don’t think I’ve been brave at all in anything. I’ve had brave personal things but I don’t want to talk about that, but career-stuff, it’s all been very much, ‘This feels right and this doesn’t feel right’.
Can you cook? If so, what’s your signature dish?
I love doing a slow-cooked shoulder of lamb with lots of tomatoes, onions, leeks, wine, carrots, it takes about four and a half hours but it’s really succulent, lots of herbs, lots of thyme, lots of garlic. I love cooking. I love good food. A big way to my heart is good food! Bad food fucking drives me nuts. I should be more tolerant of bad food but I just won’t eat. I’ve got to that stage. I’ll just fast, I’d rather not eat than eat bad food.
So you’re just standing there in a service station all agitated?
I’m down with the service station, cos if there’s a Pret I can get nuts and fruit or whatever so that’s fine. Bad food just makes me feel fucking shit, and I don’t want to feel shit!
What book would you recommend our readers read?
I haven’t finished this book but it’s amazing, George Saunders’ Vigil. It’s so good. Terrible cover. It’s just come out. George Saunders wrote a book called Lincoln In The Bardo which won the Booker Prize but this is the first time I’ve read him and it’s brilliant. If I can give you two, another one would be The Overstory by Richard Powers. Everyone knows about The Overstory because it’s probably the best novel about climate change. But George Saunders’ Vigil, it’s really cool. He’s a Buddhist as well so I really resonate with a lot of what he’s talking about. This book is obviously influenced by his Buddhism but in a cool way, you don’t need to be a Buddhist.
What’s your favourite film and why?
Being There, Peter Sellers. I saw it when it came out in 1980. It didn’t get a major release, my father took me to see it, I was aged 12 and it was on at the Penultimate Picture Palace in Oxford which was a tiny independent cinema. There was only one other person in there. It’s got Shirley MacLaine, Peter Sellers and it was his final film, it was the film he’d always wanted to make. It was directed by Hal Ashby, genius director who didn’t make that many films. I keep going back to it, it’s just extraordinary. It’s got all these unbelievable scenes. Peter Sellers plays this guy called Chauncey Gardner and he has to leave this house and he’s in his fifties and it’s the first time he’s ever left this house in his life, but there’s this scene where he doesn’t know where he’s going and he’s walking through Washington D.C. and there’s eight lines of traffic and he’s walking down the middle. It’s got the Deodato theme Also Sprach Zarathustra, the funky version, and it’s one of the best scenes in cinema of music to visual. The story is amazing and it’s just beautiful. I’m a bit of a Peter Sellers obsessive. He bought the rights to it, I believe, at the end of the 60s and tried to get it made and no-one would make it and eventually he made it with Hal Ashby and it was the last film he made before he died.
Do you have a temper? How does it manifest?
Yeah, I have had a temper. What tends to happen is I tend to bottle it up and bottle it up and then it goes [makes explosive gesture]. But it doesn’t happen that often. The meditation is pretty good on that and I gave up drinking for 18 years and that was very helpful cos there was a time when the drinking was definitely affecting my temper back in the day so I put the kibosh on that and starting meditating. I don’t throw anything, I’m back on board after two minutes, it’s not a huge thing but I’ve got a bit of a temper sometimes, occasionally.
What talent do you wish you had?
I wish I’d been a great batsman at cricket. I think I got obsessed with cricket before I got obsessed with music, or around the same time. I loved cricket but I was fucking rubbish. I wish I’d been like Viv Richards or David Gower, to go in and dispatch these fast bowlers of the world, it’s gladiatorial stuff.
What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Being a dad and trying to be a good dad to my kids. With parenting, it’s always a work-in-progress but the moment my son was born, I had a real sense of ‘OK, this is the real stuff, the rest of it is great but this is it’. So my greatest achievement, and I don’t know whether I have been, but trying to be a good dad.