Phil Selway on Bad Feeling Magazine

Philip Selway talks to the Bad Feeling Magazine podcast from home just outside Oxford, rehearsing before he flies to Chicago for Lollapalooza and his first solo shows in Canada. “I'm Canadian virgin in a way,” he says. Many of the Weatherhouse songs came while he was putting off the lyrics for Familial, his first solo album, the way other people find themselves cleaning the kitchen, and he demoed some of them on Radiohead's 2012 tour.

He wrote songs as a teenager, put them away to concentrate on drumming when Radiohead signed, and was drawn back to songwriting in his early 30s. Second time round there was little pressure. He knew the songs, he knew the players, Adem Ilhan and Quinta from his Familial live band, and he had the time, because the band had agreed after 2012 to take a break. The record he listened to most while writing was the sparely arranged solo album by Mark Hollis of Talk Talk, and it fed into the arrangements. The drums were among the first things down on the guide tracks, which gave the songs a bigger platform to build on. Familial drew a hard line between his own work and Radiohead; this time he was happy to use the Radiohead elements he loves.

Reviewers call the lyrics dark. “I wanted it to be a warm record,” he says, one of “those records that kind of wrap around you”. He doesn't shy away from trickier subjects, but he thinks of himself as an optimist. With Adem and Quinta there was a quality filter of three, the way an idea all five of Radiohead agree on is probably a reasonable one, but his name on the sleeve means he has the final say. He finds that healthy, and takes it back into Radiohead.

He has found his way back to vinyl, and loves how much music streaming opens up. The business model that pays the major labels and trickles down to the artist, he says, could be better.