Ed O'brien

Oxford, and the job of the third guitarist

Edward John O'Brien was born in Oxford on 15 April 1968 and went to Abingdon School, where in 1985 he fell in with Thom Yorke and the others in a band called On a Friday, after the only day the school let them rehearse. The line-up settled quickly and awkwardly: the drum machine broke at their first show, and Philip Selway was recruited straight afterwards. They signed to EMI in 1991 and became Radiohead.

Within that band O'Brien has always defined his job by what it is not. He rarely plays lead in any conventional sense, working instead with delay, sustain devices and an EBow to build texture behind and around Yorke's songs, running Fender Stratocasters through enough processing that the results read as synthesiser rather than guitar. He has described the work as servicing the songs. Rolling Stone placed him among its greatest guitarists in both 2010 and 2023, which is an unusual honour for a player whose signature is atmosphere rather than a riff.

Away from the instrument he has been one of the more active British musicians on the business side, co-founding the Featured Artists Coalition in 2009 to argue the artist's case on digital rights and payment. He lives between London and Wales with his wife, Susan Kobrin, and their two children, gave up drinking around 2000 and meditates.

Brazil, and a record signed with his initials

The solo work began because the songs would not fit anywhere else. O'Brien moved his family to a farm near Ubatuba in Brazil in 2012, and came back with material that Radiohead's collective writing process had no room for. He credited the country's rhythm, colour and open-heartedness with pushing the writing somewhere Radiohead would not have gone.

Earth took eight years to finish, recorded between 2012 and 2020 at Assault & Battery in London and Plas Dinam in Wales with Flood and Catherine Marks producing. It ran 46 minutes and pulled in Omar Hakim on drums, Nathan East on bass, Portishead's Adrian Utley on guitar and Laura Marling, who sang the duet Cloak of the Night. Four singles came first, from Brasil in December 2019 through Shangri-La, Olympik and the Marling duet in April 2020.

Capitol released it on 17 April 2020, which turned out to be the worst possible fortnight for a debut. Reviews were broadly positive, Metacritic settled at 70 and it reached number 13 in the UK, but the North American tour was cancelled by the pandemic and O'Brien came down with a suspected coronavirus infection during the promotional run. The record he had waited eight years to make never got a proper tour, and he released it under the initials EOB rather than his name.

Second lockdown, and five years of tapes

Blue Morpho started in the autumn of 2020 with producer Paul Epworth, and then stalled. O'Brien has been direct about why: the second lockdown sent him into what he has called a deep depression. His way back was undramatic — he picked up a guitar every day with no expectation of a song coming out of it, and eventually songs did.

The sessions ran on and off from 2020 until early 2025, split between The Church Studios in London and Seven Sound, his own place in Wales, with Riley MacIntyre engineering. The whole record is tuned to 432 Hz rather than standard concert pitch, a choice O'Brien makes on the grounds that it resonates better, particularly for acoustic instruments, and that he finds it healing. The finished album runs 38 minutes and change, which is eight minutes shorter than Earth and considerably less crowded.

Transgressive released it on 22 May 2026, under his own name. The title track arrived as a single on 17 March and Incantations on 22 April, and a short film, Blue Morpho: The Three Act Play, followed the album. Incantations opens the record on finger-picked acoustic psych-folk, the title track goes wide with orchestration, Teachers leans on the jazzier end of Amnesiac-era Radiohead, and the closer Obrigado spends ten minutes moving from something close to a dance track into long Pink Floyd-shaped drift.

The reception was a clear step up. Metacritic put it at 86, against 70 for the debut. NME's Andrew Trendell called it the sound of healing, with O'Brien out of his cocoon and in dazzling flight; Pitchfork described it as a far more confident and cohesive follow-up to Earth. It reached number five on the UK Independent Albums chart and number eight in Scotland.

Done with Radiohead, and then not

The other thing that changed between the two albums is that Radiohead came back. O'Brien told Rolling Stone in March 2026 that after the 2018 tour he had been finished with the band — it had run out of road and out of inspiration, he was not enjoying it, and he wanted another life. Earth was partly the product of that frustration; he has said that if he had not made it, a part of him would have died.

Then came the autumn of 2025 and twenty shows in five cities, the band's first live performances since 2018: Movistar Arena in Madrid on 4, 5, 7 and 8 November, Unipol Arena in Bologna on 14, 15, 17 and 18 November, the O2 in London on 21, 22, 24 and 25 November, Royal Arena in Copenhagen on 1, 2, 4 and 5 December, and Uber Arena in Berlin on 8, 9, 11 and 12 December. O'Brien has called those nights profound, and said it was the first time he properly registered how good the songs were.

The shape of what follows is now public. There is no Radiohead touring in 2026 — the members are on their own records, with Jonny Greenwood's Ranjha out in May alongside Blue Morpho and a Thom Yorke solo album due later in the year. From 2027, O'Brien says, the band will play a different continent every year and twenty shows each year, no more and no less, on the reasoning that they never want a night where they are going through the motions.

The October run

The solo tour was announced on 2 April 2026 and went on sale the same morning at 10am local time. Seven dates were billed initially: Royal Theatre Carré in Amsterdam on 4 October, Teatro Lirico in Milan on the 6th, Salle Pleyel in Paris on the 8th, Admiralspalast in Berlin on the 10th, the Laeiszhalle in Hamburg on the 12th, the Oosterpoort main hall in Groningen on the 14th and the Barbican in London on the 16th. Belfast was added afterwards, with the Belfast International Arts Festival presenting the show at the Ulster Hall on 19 October.

These are his first shows as a headliner under his own name, and the venue choices — a Victorian hall in Belfast, a 19th-century theatre in Amsterdam, two classical concert halls in London and Hamburg — say a good deal about what he is trying to do with the material. At the time of writing, in late September 2026, the run has not started, so nothing can be said about how it lands.