Ed O'Brien: Turning up, Tuning in

Radiohead guitarist Ed O'Brien tells RUSSELL BAILLIE about playing right-hand man to Neil Finn - and life in the greatest band in the world.

You are a guitarist in what many consider the greatest band in the world. You are between your difficult fourth album and the release of your fifth, which you effusively describe as the best thing your band has done.

You have an invitation to play on the other side of the world with a chap whose songs you have long admired. You take up the invite and drag another member of your band along for company and rhythm-keeping duties.

You rehearse 12 hours a day for four days in a barn by a beach on Auckland's west coast. Also in the band is another chap from England who helped to turn you on to guitar in the first place.

The shows are momentous from the first night, and the five nights turn into An Event.

You go back Up Over to the greatest band in the world and start rehearsals on Monday. And so, Ed O'Brien of Radiohead, what do you tell the folks at home about your time playing right-hand man to Neil Finn?

"I am going to try really hard not to bore people about what a great time I've had," laughs the tall, chisel-jawed musician. "You know, there was that time when we were doing Weather With You and Johnny Marr, who was one of the reasons I started playing guitar, comes over and says 'why don't you take this?'

"It's been really, really, really hard work, like learning all these songs. It's kind of reassuring when people like Johnny come up and say - because he's guested loads - 'when you guest again, you won't do anything as hard as this."'

It's the morning after the third show of the Finn and friends season. Before sitting down with O'Brien we've briefly encountered Radiohead drummer Phil Selway in the hotel lobby, who pronounces the excursion to Finn-land has been "really intense."

Upstairs, O'Brien looks like a well-to-do young British tourist as he politely requests a herbal tea from his local record company minders. He could gush for England about playing with Finn and how much of a challenge it's been.

It has been an interesting musical exercise for him, too, considering Radiohead's recent experimental moves, which have meant he hasn't been playing as much conventional guitar.

"Yeah I know. That's right. It's really weird to be playing chords again. Haven't played chords for a long time. I realised I haven't played chord changes since OK Computer and stuff like that. I've learned a lot musically in this week and it's kind of made me go back and work even harder as a musician."

But there is something else to talk about apart from playing the best Split Enz/Crowded House tribute band, ever. Radiohead have a new album, Amnesiac, on the way in early June, less than a year after than their perplexing fourth album Kid A, which followed 1997's OK Computer, an album which, with the touring that followed, reportedly caused the band much internal anguish, was praised to the heavens and sold by the millions.

The harsh, electronically distressed sound of Kid A, says O'Brien, was an intentional spanner in the works after OK Computerhad elevated them to a place they weren't sure they wanted to be.

"One of the brilliant things about Kid A was that we kind of dispelled any notion of Radiohead being ready to take on the mantle U2 were going to hand us, the baton of stadium rockery, and we were going to embrace it and it was never us.

"At the end of OK Computer we were playing big, big arenas and it wasn't right. You can do those things occasionally but at the time it didn't feel right.

"It did get quite big around OK Computer, it was suddenly really 'hang on a sec, this hasn't solved any of my problems. In fact it's made them worse.'

"The thing you worry about is that the rock'n'roll business can turn you and wants to turn you into one of these really sad old musicians.

"What is so refreshing playing with Neil Finn and all his friends is these people think exactly the same - regular people doing their thing and separating the music from the business."

A listen to a four-track preview of Amnesiac, which was recorded during the same sessions for the previous album, indicates the songs are more inviting. While Kid A was a fractured affair, electric buzz and static, the next instalment turns down the experimental factor in favour of melody and, on the likes of the brooding Pyramid Song, something majestic.

"Kid A was such an unemotional record. When we came out it was such a relief and we were kind of instilling our art. It was trip, it was a headspace. I love Kid A. I think it's really great but it's not warm. [Amnesiac] is warm.

"Stanley, who does the artwork with Thom [Yorke], his analogy was Kid A was a bit like you are phoning someone and you get the answerphone at the other end and hear their voice, and Amnesiac is like a conversation on the phone. It engages you."

But if it was recorded at the same time as the previous effort, couldn't this be seen as the second half of a double album?

"Well, it was a matter of tracklisting the first one and seeing what we got left. We tracklist really hard these days, I think it's a real art. For a band like us tracklisting is a massive, massive task. It's the only time we seriously ever think, 'right that's it, I've [expletive] had enough of this'."

So what's it like being in Radiohead, a band often perceived these days as tortured singer Yorke and four relatively normal young men from Oxford?

"I don't know where we are at the moment because we're not touring as much. That's a bit confusing. There aren't as many neuroses. It's not like Meeting People is Easy [the Radiohead tour film of the band on the rockbiz treadmill] any more, which is really cool.

"I think we might have lost a little momentum and we might need to regain it. We had loads of momentum five years ago, but the trouble with that momentum was it was coupled with a band imploding, and now our knee-jerk reaction is, if you do a few more tours, the band will start to go that way again. It won't, it's not like that, times have changed and things have moved on. I think we are in a good space.

"We are a weird bunch, we are very disparate. We are different people - you get a different take on the band whoever you speak to. Somehow, at the end of it, it goes through the filtering process and out comes the Radiohead thing.

"It makes me realise we are all really different and that is the kind of thing that might have got on our tits a few years ago, but now it's kind of something to be embraced."

* Amnesiac is released June 7.