The lovely new solo album from Radiohead drummer Phil Selway is out today, although like his two previous solo records, it’s released under the name Philip Selway. Maybe he doesn’t like being called Phil, which must be annoying cos everyone calls him Phil. I wonder what the other members of Radiohead call him? If they call him Philip and we’ve all been calling him Phil for no reason, we owe him a big apology, cos he’s never made a song and dance about it, he’s just quietly gone about his business and tried to inform us that he’s a Philip not a Phil by releasing solo albums under the name Philip Selway. I now realise I should have asked him in the interview below. I’m an idiot. Anyway, PHILIP’s new record Strange Dance is out today and it’s his best solo work yet, expansive and orchestral without ever being overblown. At points, it sounds like folk music that’s been majestically decorated. I spoke to him over the phone about how it came together, forgot to ask him if he prefers Phil or Philip but did call him Philip just in case because I’m a pro.

Hello Philip, how are you?
I’m good, thank you.

It’s almost the weekend. How’s your Friday?
Been good so far. Early morning trip to Big Yellow always starts your day off in a good way, I find. Well, the day can only get better after that anyway.

Ah good stuff. Your new record is fantastic.
Thank you very much.

It’s a lot, it’s huge!
It is, isn’t it? That was the intention. I wanted it to have that soundscape to it, but also, but wrap around something that was quite intimate in my vocal at the heart of it.

How does the finished record compare to what you had in your head at the start?
I had the scale of it in my head when I was first thinking about making a record. I’d had that couple of years where I’d been working on soundtracks, so that shifted something in what I thought about what to do with my own music. Getting to the end of the record, working with Marta Salogni producing and mixing it and then the musicians that I got to work with, Quinta and Adrian Utley and Hannah Peel, Valentina Magaletti, Laura Moody, all those different musical voices, the finished product surpassed any of my expectations.

When you’ve got that excellent roll call of people involved and your name is on it, does being a ringleader come naturally to you?
I think I was more of a convener! You don’t have those people in to do a session with you and then tell them what to do, you trust in what they will bring to it and want to set up for the best environment that people will feel relaxed, feel able to stretch what they’re doing. There was always a very open discussion about where we all felt the record was going. Also, Marta mixes as she goes along so you get a sense from the outset of, ‘oh, this is a record’. It did fall into place quite naturally.

Away from the sonics of it, what did you find yourself writing about when you were honing in on the lyrics?
When I first wrote the material, they were mumble lyrics, more about the sounds and about the rhythms than the melodies. The complete lyrics didn’t come until all the recording was done. I sat down and took away what we’d done and kind of responded to that. I didn’t want them to be especially autobiographical. I wanted people to be able to listen to the record and for the words to resonate in a way but for people to actually bring their own own narratives to it.

Which one means the most to you?
A good place to start would be probably Check For Signs Of Life. That song was addressing that whole fact that since I’d last released anything, they’d been all these huge changes in the world. I think that song really wanted to address that sense of displacement, both a sense of isolation and loss that you can experience in those periods of big change. But also, it was trying to find the little signs of hope and signs of connection in there. I certainly didn’t want to write a song about living through the pandemic because I think everybody’s had more than enough of that already, but some emotional responses were common to all of us during that time. I think they felt like very fertile ground to write about.

What did you learn making this record?
You always learn so much from all the different musicians you work with. They’re all at the peak of their powers. For instance, watching Valentina work on drums [Philip sacked himself as drummer on this album], I’ve done drum sessions since making this record and that’s really impacted on the way I’ve played. It’s still very much my take on playing drums but just actually seeing how somebody manages a session, or how we brainstorm ideas for a piece, I think that really leaves its mark on you. I feel I was quite ambitious with the project and the scope of it, so working with the artist Stewart Geddes, who made all the paintings which have become the artwork, that felt very collaborative and that then extended to all the musical relationships. It’s keeping all those different plates spinning and I don’t think I’d have been able to do that as a solo project 10 years ago. It highlighted what I’d learned over the past decade of making my own music. I was able to bring all of that skill set together in this record.

Who’s given you the best piece of advice in your career?
It’s not necessarily the best advice but I remember when we were making Pablo Honey, the very first Radiohead record, with Sean Slade and Paul Kolderie. I remember Paul giving me a lesson in how to get a snare drum in a session. It felt about 100 times harder than I would have done myself at the time. That always sticks out in my mind.

Are the members of Radiohead always in discussion about what each other is up to?
When we came into the end of the last round of touring, which was 2018, we’d agreed to take some time away from the band because we wanted to get on with different projects for a little bit. The combination of that and the pandemic happening, we didn’t talk about our separate projects that much at that point, but we once we’d gone through that period, all scattering to the different corners as we’d agreed, now we come back and we are talking about each other’s projects. I think it’s fascinating, seeing all those different aspects of what everybody can do.

Was there anything that cropped up over the course of putting together the reissues for OK Computer and Kid A/Amnesiac that surprised you or that you re-discovered?
There was a lot of material that we hadn’t used at the time. It was things on the OK Computer reissue OKNOTOK, going back and finding the original demo version of Lift. We recorded that when we’d done our initial session with Nigel Godrich. It was a song then that we’d struggled with, and so consequently it didn’t make it onto the album at the time. But then coming back to it 20 years later, and I remember Colin [Greenwood, Radiohead bassist] dug that particular version out and said, “you’ve got to listen to this, it’s pretty good!”, that was a real revelation. That was lovely. I guess it’s that that thing that you don’t always hear the best in what you’re doing at the time, you don’t you don’t hear everything, you can be so entrenched in the details and get very fixed in your ideas that actually you do miss some stuff. To then be able to come back, as we’ve done on both OK Computer and Kid A and Amnesiac and go back with fresh ears and hear the bits that didn’t feel as though they made the grade at the time but you come back to them, there was real value in that.

ND