The Radiohead guitarist told 6 Music‘s Matt Everitt that he’ll be releasing his first ever solo album next year
Radiohead’s Ed O’Brien is set to follow in the footsteps of his fellow band members by releasing a solo album next year. The guitarist sat down with 6 Music’s Matt Everitt on his First Times show and revealed the news, saying, “We’ve attempted to do something like a full solo album — you know, stand there on the mountaintop with the hair going and the Les Paul and create a whole Ed O’Brien. I haven’t up until two years ago but I am going to now. I’m gonna do one next year.”
O’Brien went on to tell Everitt about the sound of the album which, he says, has been influenced by the year he spent living in Brazil. “All I wanted to do was sit there and play guitar, and in February of that year, got taken to Carnival, and a really close friend of mine invited me and my wife to the Sambadrome in Rio. Oh, my god. It’s the greatest show on earth. Two nights, you have 12 samba schools. They’re like these processions, all these floats, and they have an hour and 20 minutes, each samba school parades down what’s called the Sambodrome, it’s like this mile long strip — they used it in the Olympics, and it runs from ten at night till six in the morning. 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.”
Before going on to say, “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. There’s an element of that joy of music. But it also again, like, a lot of Brazilian music there’s a dark heart, melancholy, but, we’re all feeling this, we recognize it but let’s celebrate being a human being because that’s part of the journey for most of us. So that’s like a watershed in my life.”
