Phil Selway

Philip Selway drops in on the second, wet day of Electric Picnic in 2010 to talk about Familial, his first solo album. The ideas had been brewing for about seven years, four of them under the radar, until he had songs too personal for Radiohead, and turning 40 gave him the push. Songs belong to the time they were written, he says; OK Computer takes him back to making and touring it, and these will key into his turn to midlife. Radiodread, the Easy Star All-Stars' reggae remake of OK Computer, has some amazing tracks, he says, and their “Let Down” is stunning.

He had spent about half a year working on a singing voice with Ian Davenport, who produced Familial, when Neil Finn's Seven Worlds Collide got him up to perform. Finn's way was to record a song, see whether people liked it and then ask him to perform it, and had Selway stopped to think he would probably have bottled it. The musicians from that project became the record's band. Radiohead's new album is not finished, and they go back to it in September.