Phil Selway on BBC 6 Music

Phil Selway's first musical memory, he tells Marc Riley on 6 Music, is waking at three in the morning on Christmas Day 1969 to a toy drum from his godmother, after which his family banned him from drums for well over a decade. His first record, bought at Woolworths in Newport when he was eight or nine and could not afford the Elvis he went in for, was The Early Years of the Beatles with Tony Sheridan, from their Hamburg residency. Last time he played it he thought “the band showed some promise really”. The first gig he went to was Altered Images at Oxford Polytechnic in 1982, so strictly the first band he ever saw was their opening act, the Bluebells. His first gig as a player was in a village hall near Oxford in 1983, playing Stiff Little Fingers and UK Subs covers, and his first time on a full kit.

He cried at Portishead at Brixton Academy in 1997, in the middle of everything around OK Computer, and is glad it was dark. The band he would stop from forming is the Shire Horses, a duo from the north-west whose Kid A parody was called Our Kid Eh. A drummer is fixed to one spot, so anyone standing just outside the reach of his sticks can say what they like, and Colin Greenwood is a past master of it. His autographs include Big Ron Atkinson's, from the national five-a-side championships at Wembley Arena in 1979. He signs off with a message for the host. “Of all the DJs I've ever listened to on 6 Music, Marc Riley, you are undoubtedly one of them.”