School's out for [the] Drummer

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.
“Before then, for a good long time, I just wanted to concentrate on drums and how they work in Radiohead. It was all about finding the confidence to put your songs across the people. I mean, even though the music was coming, it took time for me to find the right singing voice and the right tone lyrically. So, there are all these factors in the equation.”
Phil lined up a stellar array of talent to collaborate with him on Familial, including a couple of members of Wilco, and Lisa Germano and Sebastian Steinberg, all of whom he previously played with in Neil Finn’s 7 Worlds Collide collective.
“Yeah, we were all involved in 7 Worlds Collide, which Neil organised in New Zealand a couple of years ago,” reflects Selway. “Lisa and Sebastian I’d met on the original 7 Worlds, back in 2001, and then when Neil convened the whole thing, he bought in lots of songwriters and musicians. In the general melee of what was going in, there was lots of music being made, and lots of different groupings of all the musicians. I’d gone down to drum, but the songwriting side of things started to emerge down there, and in that environment, it was a very natural way of finding a group. There were people around who really fleshed out my material.”
The precedent for drummers making solo albums isn’t all that great, when you take into account the decidedly underwhelming efforts of performers like Phil Collins and Queen’s Roger Taylor. Was Phil worried about the possibility of artistic failure?
“(Long pause) How can I answer that?” he says, erupting with laughter. He then quips, “It’s a great record, so of course I don’t!”
No doubt Thom Yorke will also administer an almighty slagging should Phil’s solo album fail to do the business commercially, bearing in mind The Eraser’s impressive chart performance on both sides of the Atlantic.
“Oh no, I don’t want to get competitive!” chuckles Phil. “I’m just delighted to have made the record.”
So will Radiohead reconvene once Phil is done touring Familial?
“It’s been going on all the time actually, in parallel,” he explains. “The way that we work is we’ll do fairly intense periods of work and then take a break from it. The bits in between Radiohead is when I’ve been doing my record, so they’ve both been moving along together.”
The group admitted that they had a pretty torrid time putting together the hugely acclaimed In Rainbows. Has the process been any easier this time around?
“Difficult to know at this point,” says Phil. “When we get to the end of the process, then we’ll have a real idea of what went into making it. When you’re in the middle of making something, it’s very difficult to actually think about the process, because you’re just so caught up in the middle of it. That’s where we are at the moment – very much caught up in it.”