Radiohead’s Ed O’Brien believes he has COVID-19

Radiohead guitarist Ed O’Brien believes he has COVID-19.

In an interview with Uproxx, promoting his new album Earth, due April 17 — O’Brien revealed he’s been sick for 10 days with flu-like symptoms, and has recently lost the ability to smell and taste.

“I Googled it last night and that’s a classic symptom of the coronavirus,” he explained. “So, it’s like, okay, I’ve got it.” O’Brien stressed that he has not been tested for the virus, “because you can’t get tested here, unless you’re elderly.” But is practising self-quarantine alongside his family in Wales.

“For someone like myself, this is just a bad dose of the flu. I’m not in any way in danger,” O’Brien shared. “I basically sat outside all day because the weather is glorious. It’s the first sunshine we’ve had this spring. It’s not a bad place to be.”

O’Brien recently undertook a lengthy promo trip for Earth, which included stops in New York City, Toronto, Chicago, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Sydney, Australia, and Singapore. O’Brien believes he might have contracted the virus during a trip to Paris for a television appearance a fortnight ago.

In other news, Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard recently performed a Live from Home set that saw him cover Radiohead’s The Bends’ classic ‘Fake Plastic Trees’. 

Before launching into the “Thomas Aquinas Yorke”-penned track, Gibbard shared a story about how he and his wife recently took a trip to the Washington Peninsula. “It was a really necessary trip,” he said. “Necessary to… get to a place where our phones didn’t work for a bit and kind of just bask in the beauty of the natural world for a bit. We listened to a lot of our favourite records on that trip, and this song kind of came along came across on the car stereo. So I thought I’d do a version of it”.

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