Phil Selway on BBC 6 Music

Philip Selway joins Radcliffe and Maconie on 6 Music straight after they play a Pablo Honey track he remembers all too well; it took a few edits, and sounds to him like Radiohead on helium. On Sunday he and Stephen Morris of New Order will teach Guy Garvey to drum for one song at Manchester Central Library, where an electronic drum kit is being given in memory of Scott Johnson, Radiohead's drum technician, who was killed when the stage collapsed before the band's Toronto show three years ago. The idea of drum kits in libraries came from a man who had been due at that show, and Selway has been to see one in use in Toronto. Johnson made everything calm, he says, so the band could go out and play knowing it would all work.

He ended up behind the drums, he says, because “I went out to make the cup of tea at the wrong time.” He has just finished Yann Martel's The Book of Strange New Things, is reading a biography of Clementine Churchill, and has lately read Tanya Byron's The Skeleton Cupboard. In a former life he was a copy editor at a publisher in Oxford, a pedant with other people's writing. His solo touring has just ended with a couple of shows in America, and Radiohead reconvene this week, the gear set up in a room and the five of them looking at it puzzled. For the first couple of days they will sound like the sixth-form band they started as. This time he wants to finish something. “You need deadlines on stuff.”