Radiohead’s Ed O’Brien on the Guitar That Defines His Haunting Sound
How the art-rock icon used a specific instrument to add uncanny atmosphere to so many Radiohead classics as well as tracks from his new solo album.
Gear Crush is a column in which we ask some of our favorite musicians about the racks, stacks, and instruments they love best.
Like fog enveloping an abandoned countryside, Ed O’Brien can be counted on to set a foreboding mood. In Radiohead, the guitarist’s contributions may not be the flashiest, but they’re essential to the band’s dystopian musings. On the 2000 classic “The National Anthem,” from Kid A, a grimy bassline pops out early on, yet O’Brien’s drones make it clear that the song is far from your standard rock rallying cry. He provides similarly spooky ambience throughout Radiohead’s discography, on tracks like OK Computer’s “Lucky” and In Rainbows’ “Jigsaw Falling Into Place.” This billowing style is far from O’Brien’s only mode on the guitar—and, by the way, he also happens to be one of the most effective backup vocalists in alt-rock history—but it is his most memorable.
To create these eerie soundscapes, he’s returned to the same guitar over and over across the last 30 years: a black-on-black Fender Eric Clapton Signature Stratocaster, souped up with a sustainer pickup that extends its tones toward infinity. This bespoke model allows O’Brien to conjure entire universes of electronic-seeming textures that sublimely subvert the bluesy classic rock the guitar’s namesake is known for.
“It’s just got the juju,” he tells me via video late last month, still sounding in awe of the instrument’s powers. He’s sitting in a Los Angeles hotel room with the lights off and the shades open, the impromptu lighting casting a noirish shadow on the right side of his face. He affectionately refers to the guitar as his “Mouse Strat” because of a sticker on its body of a Mickey Mouse-like figure giving the finger alongside the words, “FUCK ’EM IF THEY CAN’T TAKE A JOKE.” He stuck the decal on during the OK Computer tour in the late ’90s and never took it off. Now, after decades of wear, about all you can make out is Mickey’s buttoned trousers and floppy shoes.
O’Brien also made good use of the guitar, alongside several others, on his recent second solo album, Blue Morpho. The record, which was produced by Adele hitmaker Paul Epworth and features an enviable supporting cast including jazz guru Shabaka Hutchings, eclectic go-to session guitarist Dave Okumu, and Radiohead drummer Phil Selway, is a shapeshifting affair. O’Brien and his collaborators meticulously move from pastoral psychedelia to melancholy folk in the lineage of Nick Drake to distorted funk that recalls U2’s Achtung Baby. You can hear the Mouse Strat in the middle of the brooding opener “Incantations,” a heady spell of a song that unspools across nearly eight minutes. It’s there near the start of “Teachers” too, diffusing the track’s strutting bassline. On that song, the 58-year-old paraphrases Dante’s Inferno when he murmurs, “Midway through life I just lost my way.”
Blue Morpho came out of a deep depression O’Brien found himself mired in during the pandemic, when the stillness of the world allowed past traumas to catch up with him. In order to work through the malaise, he turned to one of the most trusted constants in his life: his guitars. He would sit in a tiny spare bedroom in his family’s London house for hours each morning—“It was the only place I could play without disturbing anyone,” he says—staring at the wall and playing. He describes these solitary sessions as a kind of trance. “It was like a semi-meditative state. I didn’t engage my mind, it was much more from the subconscious. You cannot apply your critical mind when you’re in that flow state, because the music needs to just come out, it just needs to be.”
It’s inspiring to hear O’Brien talk about music in such a passionate—and mysterious—way, after all he’s accomplished, after all the lives he’s changed in some way or another. I was 15 when OK Computer came out. At first, admittedly, I didn’t think it was as good as The Bends. But then I kept listening. Soon enough, the album cracked open my taste. It was one of the records that turned me from a music fan into a music obsessive; if it weren’t for OK Computer, there is a chance I never would have become a music journalist. As I talked with O’Brien about his most cherished guitar, there were moments when I had to restrain myself from turning into a version of Chris Farley interviewing Paul McCartney on Saturday Night Live: Remember when you guys did Amnesiac? That was awesome! All things considered, I think I held it together pretty well.
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