Phil Selway on BBC Radio 4

Phil Selway has been a Samaritans volunteer for 17 years, and Radio 4's You and Yours, marking the charity's 50th anniversary, asks him why. He joined in 1986, his first year as a student in Liverpool, after a leaflet in freshers' week asked for people who could give others time and space to explore their feelings. He wanted a connection with the city beyond “sitting in the students' union with a snakebite”, and after an all-boys school where nobody talked about feelings, it felt like a new start.

It has been a constant since he was 19, while everything around Radiohead changed, and a place where “you're not the focus of it, the callers are the focus of it”. With three boys under five and a busy touring year, he is a non-listening volunteer for now, and means to go back to the phones. Asked whether it feeds the band's melancholy, he allows that he has a melancholic side, but points out that he is only the drummer. The training is all about listening, which sounds passive and is not. “You listen to the spaces in between what people are telling you,” he says.