Phil Selway on Spinner

Philip Selway tells Spinner that for the songs on Familial, his first solo record, he heard no drum parts at all, “which was a very peculiar experience for me”, and for a while he wondered whether he had lost it. Singing was new too: years of backing vocals in Radiohead were a starting point, but finding a tone and a delivery of his own took a lot of trial and error, and some horrendous first playbacks. The songs had gathered slowly, and three or four years ago he saw that they made a collection, one that did not fit within Radiohead. He was approaching 40, at the middle of life, looking back and ahead in equal measure, and the record is about the relationships around him, family and people he has worked with for a very long time.

He wanted the warmth without the sentiment. The players on the record, Lisa Germano, Sebastian Steinberg, and Glenn Kotche and Pat Sansone of Wilco, understood restraint, kept the space around each song, then found ways of scuffing it up so it never got too pretty or precious. At Easter he took Germano, Steinberg and David Coulter round low-key club shows in Italy, Spain and Portugal for a fortnight. With no experience at the front of a stage and the audience a couple of feet away, he calls it an apprenticeship and a baptism of fire, and 43 a good age to start.