Radiohead guitarist Ed O’Brien has announced plans to release his debut solo album. He will be the fourth Radiohead member to go it alone, following side-projects from Thom Yorke, Philip Selway and Jonny Greenwood.
The record is set to be released after the band finish their current world tour, and is inspired by the time O’Brien and his family relocated to Brazil. Talking to BBC 6 Music’s Matt Everitt, he said: “[My] kids were born in 2004 and 2006. And I said to the [Radiohead] guys: in five years’ time, me and my wife are gonna go and live in Brazil for a year. I don’t wanna put the kibosh on anything but this is something we have to do. Don’t feel you can’t make a record. Make a record without me, if I can come in later on, whatever ... I’d had so many adventures with this band; I wanted to have an adventure with my family.”
He continued: “So we went to live in Brazil, in the middle of the Brazilian countryside, and we lived on a little farm in basically a hut the size of this room next to a waterfall. Life was really simple. Kids went to the local school. No one could speak English, so they picked it up, the language of play and stuff. And life was reduced to its simple parts. For me, it was music and my family. And I would go each day, walk up the hill to this beautiful little hut next to this lake, and I started writing.”
After several false starts and periods of frustration, O’Brien says he became inspired by the processions running down the Sambadrome in Rio. “It was the greatest thing I’ve ever, ever, ever experienced in terms of music,” he said. “Everyone sings. There must be 4,000 people in each samba school who parade down there, and the combination of writing music and that feeling of being there and being like, ‘Oh my god, music can be like this.’ It was so profound, so it’s fed my whole inspiration and writing. There’s an element of that joy of music. But, like a lot of Brazilian music, there’s a dark heart.” Elsewhere in the interview, O’Brien revealed that the recordings Radiohead made at Jack White’s Third Man Studios were fruitless and would not be released: “It’s not worth waiting for. If anything was amazing, you can be sure we’d try and put it out.”
