Phil Selway on Guy Garvey's Finest Hour

Philip Selway takes Guy Garvey's 6 Music class for a couple of weeks as supply DJ, telling it to stop playing with its mobile phones, and plays “Let Down” from what he calls his day job, Radiohead. “We never play that one live,” he says, so playing the record on air is probably as close as he will come to playing it live, and he can picture the sights, sounds and smells of recording it. “All wood smoke, of course.”

In the late 80s he went to visit Ed O'Brien at university in Manchester and the two of them saw Gil Scott-Heron. “With hindsight, it probably was the coolest thing I've ever seen,” he says. Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks went round on repeat on a little airport bus, overnight, when a Radiohead tour bus broke down in Portland. Nigel Godrich recently played Radiohead “Cavern” by Liquid Liquid, and Selway won't spoil which famous track it inspired.

His wife has been texting him suggestions for a DJ name, and the one that amused him most is MC Square, a bit disrespectful but not entirely inappropriate. In a couple of weeks he plays Coachella under his own name. The first time was with Radiohead in 2004, when they had to follow one of the Pixies' comeback shows; following it, he says, was “a very effective laxative”.