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Ed O’Brien has opened up on his insecurities as a guitar playing, reflecting on how the bond with his Radiohead bandmates pulled through.
O’Brien had a feeling that the Radiohead reunion shows were going to be okay when he was at Jonny Greenwood’s 50th birthday party making small talk in front of the fire with frontman Thom Yorke.
Speaking to Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, he says he could feel the friendship coming back, admitting that over the years they had drifted apart. And this was all the motivation they needed to commit to booking live dates, and to getting into a rehearsal space to learn how to play together after their hiatus.
“I think we felt the friendship come back,” says O’Brien. “I remember standing around the fire, talking to Thom, and Thom and I have always been... We were really close, and I hadn’t seen him for a long time. We’d sort of drifted apart. We stood next to fire and sort of… ‘How are you?’ ‘How are you?’ …the classic guy kind of stuff. You could feel the friendship. I could feel the love.”
There began the path to the reunion, to The Church Studios, Paul Epworth’s studio in London’s Crouch End, and to the live dates in November and December last year.
But the story also reads like a metaphor for how O’Brien has dealt with depression. In recent interviews, he has revealed how he would eschew traditional therapy treatments, force himself to get up on the morning and play guitar for hours at a time.
“My therapy was literally locking myself in a room for three hours in the morning whilst the kids were homeschooling and my wife was working,” he told Rolling Stone. “I was in such a dark place, but I knew that I had to get up each day, get out of bed, and do this thing.”
Little did he know, O’Brien would come out of the other side of it with a new solo album, Blue Morpho. In conversation with Lowe, he expanded on how his depression impacted his feeling of self-worth, his playing, and his place in the band.
“I think I always had an idea of what I brought to the band,” says O’Brien. “I was just really fucking insecure about it. I always felt like, in musical hierarchies, there’s Thom and Jonny, and the rhythm section is its own thing. Where am I?”
Things got worse when Radiohead had an existential volte-face in 1999 and decided upon this grand reconstruction of what they should sound like. Where were the guitars?
“When we made Kid A, I was in a really dark place again,” says O’Brien. “We were dismantling the band – of how it was, the form of it – and I’m smoking a lot of spliff. I’m taking herbal antidepressants, and I’m sort of medicating myself.”
O’Brien says he lost all sense of self-worth.
“Because when you’re depressed, you have no self-confidence whatsoever,” he adds. “And you see other people thriving.”
Working through Radiohead’s issues and eventually coming to the realization that they would do a string of shows together reminded O’Brien of just how the band worked, how the camaraderie hadn’t died, and how important they were to each other. Those pre-show rehearsals took them all back to a more innocent time.
“In a way, it was kind of like our village hall rehearsals back in the late ‘80s,” says O’Brien. “Because it was the first time we’d done a rehearsal where there was no expectation of new material, or all going on a tour. There was no pressure.
“They’re really fucking beautiful human beings. And like family, we’re all little bit gnarly. But everybody has a really, really good heart, really good heart. Nobody’s trying to stiff one another. There’s genuine kindness, and that’s the thing that came to me, but I think it came to everyone else as well.”
In other Radiohead news, it was recently revealed that the band had finally been convinced to ditch their cables and go wireless for their reunion shows thanks to a new piece of tech.
