Phil Selway on WNYC Soundcheck

Philip Selway plays three songs alone on guitar on WNYC's Soundcheck days before Radiohead play two nights at New York's Roseland Ballroom: “By Some Miracle”, “The Witching Hour” and “What Goes Around”, one of four songs on the new Running Blind EP. Some of those four were once front runners for Familial, he tells John Schaefer, but the album turned into a late-night, pillow-talk record and they didn't fit. Philip, rather than Phil, is “my stage name”.

Juana Molina's looping, Will Oldham and Tunng were around him as he wrote, though he only saw it once the record was done; at the time he was finding out whether he could sing the songs at all. Handing the drums to Glenn Kotche of Wilco was easy, he says, because Kotche is such an amazing player; he couldn't hear drum parts for the songs, which had worried him. He hardly played guitar as a boy. The band bought him one for his 30th birthday, which he suspects was a comment on his drumming.

Asked whether Radiohead's success is a cushion or a bar set too high, he says both: more people listen than otherwise would, and the band's benchmark at the back of his mind is no bad thing. Solo records give the band's natural dynamic more room to breathe, he says. “So it's not a case of the door opens, the drummer walks in and says hey guys I've written a song. I deliberately avoided that one.” On the 20th anniversary of Nevermind he remembers that Radiohead signed in 1991, when EMI were looking for their answer to Nirvana. “We didn't quite turn into Nirvana, but they stuck with us anyway.”