Phil Selway on BBC 6 Music

Philip Selway brings Weatherhouse into Lauren Laverne's live room on 6 Music a couple of weeks after it came out, with Adem Ilhan, who produced it, beside him. They finished it in February. “I've been sat on it for about six months,” Selway says. Days earlier he was on The Tonight Show in New York, standing in, he says, as “Sharon Jones of the night”, with the Dap-Kings, about ten of them, behind him, after the Daptone Soul Revue blew him away at Shepherd's Bush Empire in the summer.

They made the record from the start of 2013 at Radiohead's studio outside Oxford, in a year off from the band, a closed shop of Selway, Ilhan and Quinta, who had both been in his band on the tour for his first solo album, Familial. Ilhan says the idea was to start from scratch, and once Selway got behind the kit the drums plainly became the centre of the record. “Coming Up for Air” was the first song they recorded, and it convinced Selway he had something to bring as a drummer. “It Will End in Tears” dates from the demos for Familial; this time they played it straight, like a Carly Simon or Carole King song. His friend Ted Dewan seized on its weather house and made a sculpture for the sleeve, so, as with Familial, the artwork gave the album its name. The biggest lesson of Familial, asked for one, is “smile on stage”, before he admits it was finding a singing voice.

Next February he plays four shows in the UK, from the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London to Manchester. Familial suited small rooms, but this will be a bigger-sounding show, with a larger band and Selway's new toy, a Xylosynth: a controller laid out like a marimba that he hits with sticks to set off a sound or a loop. The three of them have written an hour of music, for two rooms, for the Rambert dance company's new staging of Merce Cunningham's work, the first since he died five years ago. “We weren't able to fall back on any of our usual tricks,” Selway says. Radiohead have just started again, working in pockets of two or three weeks. Time apart, with work the others might not care for, “clears the air for us all”, so that what they do together feels exactly right.