The guitarist is recovering from coronavirus – a pandemic he says is a global wake-up call – and releasing the solo album he finally plucked up the courage to make
Ed O’Brien believed Radiohead’s turbulent years were behind him. It was 2001 and the guitarist and “band mum” had tamed egos, anchored stressful tours and clung tight as his bandmates swerved into electronic music. Now, the five-piece had nothing to prove, and he had slipped underwater. “I took St John’s Wort, a herbal antidepressant,” he recalls. “It scared the fuck out of me. It numbed me.”
O’Brien, now 51, was numb to everything back then, except for chronic back pain – a cruel irony for the child from a family of osteopaths. To recuperate, he and his girlfriend flew to
Brazil, where they met a pair of friends. An encounter with a healer, they told him, may have saved their lives. He took the address.