Creativity Quote by Ed O'Brien

Risk is the point here, and Ed O'Brien is admitting it out loud. The plan sounds almost clinical at first: six or seven new songs, about a third of the set, “a good balance.” That’s the manager-brain version of artistic courage, the kind musicians adopt when they’re trying to protect both the audience’s expectations and their own momentum. But the sentence that lands is the last one, where the spreadsheet logic collapses into something human: “when we’ll play the very first new piece, we will be scared.”

The intent is partly tactical. By pacing new material across the night, the band can test-drive songs in the real world before they’re “finished” in a studio sense. That’s how rock bands used to build records: the crowd becomes an unwitting co-producer, offering data through energy, silence, and that ambiguous halfway-clap that means, We’re trying. O'Brien isn’t pretending this is romantic. He’s framing it like an experiment with variables and a control group (the familiar hits).

The subtext is a quiet critique of legacy. A band at Radiohead’s scale is expected to deliver a greatest-hits museum show, and new songs threaten that unspoken contract. “Public’s reaction” isn’t curiosity; it’s the fear of being misread, punished, or simply tolerated. Calling the moment “scared” is also a flex: even artists with decades of cultural capital can’t buy certainty. The vulnerability is the authenticity, and it’s also the message to the audience: meet us halfway, because we’re jumping first.