Phil Selway

Phil Selway, at a wet Electric Picnic, talks to Dan Hegarty about Familial, his first solo record, and is precise about how long it took. The ideas had been brewing for about seven years, and for four of those he worked under the radar with no notion of a solo album at all. What changed was arriving at a set of songs too personal to belong to Radiohead, at the same moment as turning 40, which he says gave him the push to get on with it.

Asked whether the songs mean more to him than the band's, he refuses the comparison. Whatever a person writes belongs to that point in their life, he says. He can still put on OK Computer and be taken back to the making and touring of it, and expects these songs to key into his own middle stretch in the same way.

He is delighted to be asked about the Easy Star All-Stars' reggae version of OK Computer, and says their “Let Down” is better than the original.

For the singing he credits Neil Finn and Seven Worlds Collide entirely. Finn's method was to record it, ask whether people liked it, then ask him to perform it, and Selway says that had he been given time to think about any of it beforehand he would have bottled it.