Back in 2000, on their pioneering album Kid A, Radiohead stopped using drums. Was Philip Selway, the band’s drummer, insulted? “Well, once I got over my initial sulk, I could see where it was going,” he says, referring to the electronic direction that the group’s singer, Thom Yorke, was taking them in. Since then, this often confounding outfit have reverted to a more accessible sound, mostly. Songs from last year’s lush A Moon Shaped Pool connected with thousands on a vast tour, and its climax, a searing Glastonbury set, also offered up an unlikely smattering of 1990s hits.
“Interesting stuff has come out of the points when we’ve been rather more insular,” Selway says carefully of the band’s two decades of wilful experimentation and copious glitches. “But it might not have made as many connections — if that doesn’t sound too cryptic?”
I certainly wouldn’t want to write a lyric for Thom!
He talks fondly of the show they played in Manchester in July. It had been postponed after the terrorist attack on the city’s arena, where Radiohead were due to perform. It was still light during the first part of the set, and Selway remembers the audience’s rapt attention spreading further and further back; strong emotions, infectious on an emotionally heightened night.
“When people come to our shows, they have a personal investment in the music, and when it all comes into alignment, you feel that stuff again as well,” he explains. “Then you’re all sharing the same experience, and it’s a privilege, an incredibly enriching musical experience.”
And to get the big question out the way, when are the band due back, given that they aren’t exactly prolific? “You’ve all got to be in the right space to bring the right energy again and be excited by what you can do together,” Selway says. How do they decide? “There comes a point when someone has to say, ‘Are we ready to jump back in?’” Is there a Radiohead WhatsApp group for that? “No. But there’s some good email threads going on…”
In the meantime, Selway has more than enough going on. Next month sees the release of his soundtrack for the film Let Me Go, which is in cinemas this weekend. An adaptation of a memoir by Helga Schneider, who discovered the mother who abandoned her in order to work at Auschwitz, the film stars Juliet Stevenson and is powerful, in its own quiet way.
Selway sees it as a plea for peace, and his score is suitably eerie, if pretty and decidedly non-drummy. Instead, the sounds on it, inspired by Max Richter, are strings, piano, guitar, glockenspiel, bowed vibraphone, bass, musical saw and, yes, some drums. There are also two songs on which he sings, one including the lyrics: “I waited for you… I called out… Nobody answered…” He denies it is about waiting for Yorke to restart Radiohead, given that the lyrics are for characters in the film. “It’s quite liberating, writing like that,” he says, ending such gossip there and then.
Did he keep back any ideas that might have been suitable for the band so he could put them in his own work? He shakes his head, saying he doesn’t think his nascent ideas would fit into Radiohead. “What you have,” he says, “before the rest of us get involved, are Thom’s songs, and that gives a strong identity running through it. I certainly wouldn’t want to write a lyric for Thom!”
Polite, softly spoken, with a gentleman’s umbrella, satchel, waistcoat and trainers, Selway is exactly how you’d expect a member of Britain’s best-loved prog band to be. When told a website named him the 26th greatest drummer ever, he smiles and, in a way few pop stars do, mentions the Cary Grant film Arsenic and Old Lace, suggesting that if he can “finish off the 25 ahead of me, I’ll be number one”. He is self-deprecating, too: when I say his work in Radiohead became tricksier as time went on, he shrugs and says: “You would hope so after 30 years, really.”
Let Me Go isn’t his first solo effort. There were two singer-songwriter albums in 2010 and 2014, plus a score for the Rambert Dance Company. Was stepping out from behind the drums, after all that time staring at Yorke’s ever-changing hairstyles, like a midlife career change? “Absolutely,” he replies. “Same country, different language. You have to convince other people that you’re capable.”
Was it also that, once Yorke went off by himself and the guitarist Jonny Greenwood began writing scores, he wanted a slice of solo attention? “We’re all very supportive,” he says, “but at the same time we are competitive. You want to prove to the others you can do it. That might not be stated overtly, but…”
Radiohead, he says, have a set way of working. Before he was in the band, as a teenager, Selway wrote songs. “Cringeworthy” is how he imagines they were, but as soon as the band were signed, any ambition to improve his writing was put off. “That is a big step up,” he says of turning professional. “You go from being an enthusiastic amateur to people having expectations of you, so I really wanted to focus on drumming. For about a decade, I put songwriting on the back burner.”
I shift the conversation to a tragedy recently in the news. In 2012, a stage collapsed in Toronto ahead of a Radiohead show, killing the band’s drum tech, Scott Johnson, 33. Charges were filed against the promoter, Live Nation, and others. The case dragged on, and this month a judge ruled it had taken too long to come to trial, then stayed the charges. The band’s drummer was clearly shaken by this.
“I’m appalled by the decision,” he says. “It’s an insult to the memory of Scott, his parents and the rest of our crew. It’s had a lot of impact on them. Scott’s parents have been unbelievable, so generous-spirited, but for all of us it feels like there’s no closure. No assurance that it’s not going to happen again.” Does he know what they can do next? “No. It’s left everybody reeling.”
Selway has to go — to a London cinema for the premiere of Let Me Go. On behalf of Radiohead fans, I ask whether any of their fabled unreleased songs are likely to see a studio version at any point. “I’m not sure how many we’ve got left,” he says. I suggest Follow Me Around, which dates from the late 1990s. “You’ve been speaking to Colin [Greenwood], haven’t you?” he replies, smiling, as I imagine the bassist begging, unsuccessfully, to record the song on every album since the Blair years.
The Johnson decision is a rare black mark on a banner 2017 for the band, with the continued shine off A Moon Shaped Pool and a reissue of OK Computer in June. Selway enjoyed revisiting songs they are best known for, connecting with people again. “You can only play [old] material when there’s a collective love of those songs again,” he says. “And I think that came through this year.”