Science & Tech Quote by Ed O'Brien

There’s a particular kind of unease that hits a band right as the culture starts treating them like infrastructure. Ed O’Brien’s line lands because it’s not anti-success so much as anti-mismatch: the scale got ahead of the spirit. Coming off OK Computer, Radiohead weren’t just popular; they were being installed as the voice of millennial dread. The “big, big arenas” become an image of misalignment, a physical metaphor for the album’s themes: technology flattening intimacy, systems swallowing individuals, the self turned into audience data. If the record diagnoses modern alienation, then performing it in aircraft-hangar venues risks turning critique into product demo.

The repetition in “big, big” feels like a wince. It’s childish emphasis used to communicate a grown-up problem: awe and dread bundled together. He’s careful, too: “You can do those things occasionally.” That’s the pragmatist talking, acknowledging that spectacle has its place and that a band of their size can’t pretend to be a club act forever. The sting is in “at the time.” This isn’t a moral stance carved in stone; it’s a snapshot of a moment when the machine was accelerating and they could feel themselves being pulled into it.

Underneath, it’s also about authorship. Arenas encourage persona, hits, pantomime. Radiohead’s identity then was precision, discomfort, negative space. O’Brien is describing the instant when success threatened to rewrite the band’s language, and they had the taste - and the fear - to notice.