School's out for [the] Drummer
ahead of his appearance at electric picnic radiohead drummer Phil Selway tells us about his fantastic solo album.
Paul Nolan, 02 Sep 2010
Just as I’m about to commence my interview with Radiohead drummer Phil Selway – who’s poised to release his excellent debut solo album, Familial – a scene from the band’s 1998 documentary Meeting People Is Easy flashes before my eyes. The film shows in painful detail the more mundane and tedious aspects of touring and promotion, and in the clip I’ve just remembered, guitarist Jonny Greenwood is sitting on his bed in yet another hotel room, holding the phone receiver (with a hapless journalist on the other end) away from his face, and opting to watch TV rather than listen to another batch of banal questions.
“Don’t worry,” the affable Selway reassures me down the line from New York. “Television’s not on, and the receiver is firmly by my ear.”
Having received further assurances that Mr. Selway doesn’t have his laptop hooked up either, we plough ahead with our interrogation concerning Familial, which is a rather beautiful collection of low-key acoustica. Was Phil looking to bring out his inner Nick Drake?
“I’ve been working on these songs for a while,” he responds. “I suppose the nature of how they were written really determined the sound. The music has gone under the radar and hasn’t gone beyond the confines of my house, so that lends itself to that very intimate, Nick Drake thing, as you say. There was also a sense as the material was coming together that it wasn’t appropriate in the context of Radiohead, and so I said to myself, ’Well, if this is going to be outside the band, it should actually be very different to what we’d normally do together.’”
What was the impulse for Phil to finally do a solo album?
“I think actually approaching 40 had a lot to do with it,” he admits. “I wasn’t ready to do it before then, and I felt that if I didn’t commit to it at that point, the ambition and opportunity to make an album might pass me by. Starting to record your debut record at 40, you already feel a little after-the-event, in some ways, but it was the right time to do it.
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