Phil Selway on Echoes

Philip Selway explains the title of Weatherhouse to Echoes. A weather house is an old barometer from European folk art, a little house with two figures on one rod, one coming out in the sun and driven back inside by the rain, when the other comes out. To him it was a picture of a close relationship, two people bound together who “can't ever both be in the Sun at the same time”. Asked whether he means his marriage or Radiohead, he says “neither, certainly not my marriage”.

On Familial, his first solo album, he kept out anything that sounded like Radiohead, his drums included. Deciding the arrangements of Weatherhouse with his two collaborators, Adem Ilhan and Quinta, a Mellotron to hand, he was comfortable letting some of it back in, on songs like “Miles Away”. For “Coming Up for Air” he wanted a click track with more character than the generic one he usually starts a song from, and that is where the pulsing synth under it came from: a drum machine called the Tempest.

The record is dedicated to Scott Johnson, Radiohead's drum technician, killed when a stage collapsed on him in 2012, and “Don't Go Now” is subtitled for an English teenager killed in a bike accident. Both were in his head as he wrote. The song is about what is called the searching phase of grief, when you are convinced, he says, “because you desperately want their physical presence that you see them or that you hear them”.