Ed O’Brien, Radiohead guitarist, speaks to Felix White about his love of cricket, the game’s parallels with music and growing up wanting to be David Gower.
This is an extended version of a piece which appeared in issue 10 of Wisden Cricket Monthly. Click here to subscribe to the magazine
There are good bands, there are special bands, and then there is Radiohead. An eternally evolving think-tank of a group, they’ve spent the last two decades proving that the biggest can also be the best.
During the 15-year lifespan of my own band, The Maccabees, we’d await each new record with trepidation. The perennial concern was that they were going to prove to us that everything we knew was wrong, again. Large parts of subsequent rehearsals after said release would be spent locked into grooves that would begin with charged positive intensity, until someone would look up, wincing, and mouth, ‘Too Radiohead?’.
As is custom for bands, we’d usually start by blaming each other. It’s your picky guitars. It’s your drum pattern. It’s the way you’re singing. Usually, it turned out, it was the whole thing. ‘Scrap it, it’s too Radiohead.’
We did a lot of that. I can vouch that we weren’t the only ones either. Groups, and very, very good ones at that, still stretch whole albums out of transient ideas seeded on Radiohead songs. They remain so strikingly of their own laws and universe, their impression has seared its way into the heads of musicians globally.
Their legacy is indelibly marked across global guitar culture to the degree that albums which critics considered avant-garde and borderline unpalatable on release (Kid A and Amnesiac especially) have informed the landscape so dramatically that, on reflection, they now sound like pretty conventional rock records.
If live music and cricket do have common ground in their public service, the blissed-out simplicity of bringing people together would be it. “There’s a ritual to it,” he says. “There was the chaos of the early years but as a band we have learnt to walk out on stage and feel relaxed so we can play and be in the moment. It’s all about how you approach that day. Maybe it’s age that helps, but I really believe in ceremony and that the preparation is the key. Great gigs are like ceremony, a sporting event is like a ceremony. There’s something that’s very deep about it.”
Gower’s innings, I’m prepared to believe, was deep. U2 in ’85 I’d have to take his word for.
Radiohead tonight are very, very deep. They are so mesmeric, the guitar playing so lucid and expressive, they make an arena with a legacy even bigger than the artists it houses seem small. There are moments where you can actually feel 20,000 people all experiencing the same thing at the same time. “That’s the bit I love of a gig,” says Ed. “I think arenas can be amazing places like that. I remember that from the first time we played here. It’s almost like there’s a calmness, you’re just a part of something.”
Our conversation veers through music and cricket in some detail for two hours. Littered with the customary stories of personal cricketing failures (“I was fielding on a cratered outfield, misjudged the ball and ended up doubled over, hit in the nuts”) we conclude with Ed earning some validation in the company of the game’s greats.
Introduced to Mike Brearley, they shared notes. “He invites me into this box and there’s Ian Botham, David Gower and Mike Gatting. I was so overawed. I remembered my 11-year-old self. I didn’t always have the happiest childhood. Cricket meant a lot. I thought, if he could see me now, you know. It was just amazing.” I think those words would look pretty good on the walls of the MSG.
