Radiohead’s Ed O’Brien has spoke about his plans to release a solo album inspired by his time spent living in the Brazilian countryside with his family five years ago.
"We lived on a little farm in basically a hut the size of this room next door,” O’Brien said, speaking to BBC 6 Music. “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."
"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. And I took out all this gear – because Thom said, you know, ‘You’re really good at, just do all the ProTools stuff!’ And I applied myself, cause I never really applied to it, and I sat and after about eight weeks, I said ‘I’m not feeling this, this is rubbish!’"
He says that a later trip to Carnival soon put him onto the right track: "It was the greatest thing I’ve ever, ever, ever experienced in terms of music. So of course, the beats, what they call the bateria, and it’s like all these polyrhythms. Everyone sings. There must be 4000 people on 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."
O’Brien also spoke about the recordings that Radiohead made at Jack White’s Third Man Studios describing them as "not worth waiting for" suggesting it was unlikely that they would be released in any form. "Jack was so hospitable, him and his engineer – he records everything on 8-track. Listen, it’s not worth waiting for. If anything was amazing, you can be sure – we’d try and put it out."
Finally, O’Brien spoke on the subject of Glastonbury 2017, tickets for which sold out yesterday morning. When asked whether Radiohead will be headlining the festival next year, O’Brien responds: "I would love to, I mean I go to Glastonbury every year, it’s my carnival, to be asked to play at Glastonbury again would be magic.
"Everyone who leaves that Festival, you’re with our tribe and that’s what I feel like. Being in Shangri-La at three in the morning, it doesn’t get better than this. When we leave our faith is restored in humanity. You leave, and it’s like ‘people can be great can’t they, people can be absolutely amazing.’ So, yeah it will be great to play there."
