Phil Selway on BBC 6 Music

Phil Selway drives from Oxford to Manchester for Mary Anne Hobbs's The Key of Life on 6 Music and owns up that his first gig, with a school band doing UK Subs and Stiff Little Fingers covers, was the first time he had sat at a drum kit. “I just thought I can do that,” he says, and “it's confidence I've kind of tried to get back to ever since”. At first he had only a snare drum and played the rest on furniture and pots and pans, with nothing to stand in for a kick drum, which is why “my kick drum technique has always been shocking”. Summer jobs paid for a kit at 16.

He was a quiet child with two older sisters, and their Pink Floyd, Joy Division and Clash records opened a window on a world far from his nice middle-class home counties life. He first played with anyone from Radiohead at a 24-hour jam, sitting down with Thom Yorke for “Dear Prudence”. Colin Greenwood, Yorke and Ed O'Brien had done a show with a drum machine, and after some circling in the pub O'Brien asked him to a rehearsal at the start of 1986. They thought they would be playing Wembley by the summer.

Listeners' questions bring out his first drumming hero, Stewart Copeland, whose approach he still hasn't mastered; his first single was the Police's “Message in a Bottle”. Mitch Mitchell is the drummer he would be, and OK Computer and In Rainbows are his favourite Radiohead albums; he can still see the room where they recorded “Climbing Up the Walls”, and the time of night. The show he remembers is a festival in South Korea in 2012, where they had never played, with about 50,000 people singing along in a language not their own. Looking across at the others and Clive Deamer, who was drumming with them as well, he remembered where it all came from: the five band members had all been at the same school. Fame has never sat easily with them, though he thinks Yorke has handled being its face brilliantly.

After about 18 months off they meet again in the autumn. He could pick up the gold carriage clock now, he jokes, but “we still got our best record in us yet to come”. The song he picks is “The Colour of Spring”, from Mark Hollis's solo record, and that record shaped his own solo record, Weatherhouse, though the two sound nothing alike.