Phil Selway on XFM

Philip Selway co-hosts John Kennedy's Xposure on XFM, picking the records and playing three of his own songs on an acoustic guitar. It is the night after all five of Radiohead squeezed into a tiny, very loud DJ booth at the Boiler Room to launch the King of Limbs remix album. Asked what Radiohead have planned for 2012, he explains how decisions get made. “The way it works is that we get together to arrange getting together to discuss it a bit more.”

The hard part of The King of Limbs, he says, came after the studio, in working out how to play it live. Hence Clive Deamer, who arrived on the first day with the same drum kit and the same shaved head as Selway. With a second drummer beside him he can lay back and play off someone. A listener asks whether “The Daily Mail” and “Staircase”, the two new songs on From the Basement, will get studio versions; he thinks those performances pretty much got the songs, and agrees to raise it at the next meeting. The hexadecimal mix of “Planet Telex”, from The Bends era, changed how it was played live.

At about 15 he walked into the barber's with the sleeve of Orange Juice's Rip It Up and asked to look like Edwyn Collins; it never worked. Dolly Parton's original “I Will Always Love You” gets played wherever he can, to win the song back from Whitney Houston. Other Lives make his list too: he saw them lately at the Jericho Tavern in Oxford, where Radiohead started out and got signed, and was amazed how much they fit on that small stage. John Martyn, he says, set out a blueprint for what Radiohead do, coming out of folk and taking up technology as it arrived.

His solo songs were written hidden away in his bedroom while he learned to sing, and recorded to sound “very intimate, very much like pillow talk”. He plays “What Goes Around”, “By Some Miracle” and “The Witching Hour”, about waking in a cold sweat in the night with the thought of dying one day. Standing at the front of a stage is a different craft, and having tried it, he marvels at the way Thom Yorke loses himself in the music.