Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas

by Chuck Klosterman

O’Brien is the fifth member of the band I have spoken with over the past eight hours, each in a different room of the Old Parsonage. I’ve been rushing from room to room for answers, not unlike the final ten minutes in a game of Clue. O’Brien is the last person I’m speaking with today, and he’s different from the other four guys in the band: he’s significantly taller (six feet five), he’s the only one who doesn’t reside in Radiohead’s native city of Oxford (he lives an hour away in London), and he talks like an intelligent hippie (if such a creature exists). He’s also rumored to be the most “rock-oriented” member of Radiohead, preferring the conventional structures of older songs, like “Ripcord” and “Just.” Here, again, my assumption is wrong. “Do people really think I like straight-ahead rock?” he asks when I bring this up. “There is an irony in that, because I’ve always been more interested in making sounds, which is why I tend to gravitate toward Kid A material. If I ever made a solo record—and I have no plans to do that, but if I did—it would be all ethereal music. I like to smoke. I like a toke or two. So I like music in that vein.”