Phil Selway on Talkhouse Podcast

Talkhouse puts two drummers together, Phil Selway and Blur's Dave Rowntree, passing acquaintances who sound like old friends from the start, as Selway gets ready to release Strange Dance, with Rowntree's first solo album, Radio Songs, just out. Rowntree opens on the 4am fear that his record will be rubbish, and Selway knows it well: he never has trouble getting to sleep, but at three or four in the morning everything is loud and clear in his head.

When Radiohead signed in 1991, Selway suddenly felt he had to become a proper drummer and a proper musician, and the songwriting he had started alongside his drumming went quiet. It came back in his downtime, to remind himself he had a musical voice beyond the band. At Neil Finn's studio in Auckland, where he had gone as a drummer, he played his songs around the place until the others told him to record one, and with those musicians playing it he first thought he might be able to do this.

Rowntree's only classical gig, a Messiah at 13 or 14, ended with him improvising after the bass player forgot to nudge him at his entry. Selway's school orchestra was much the same, his sight-reading shocking and his head of music happy to let him make up the snare part. Selway scores with an ensemble in mind, working with the string arranger Laura Moody, and still feels a novice at film. Strange Dance was finished a year earlier and held up by the nine-month queue for vinyl. Finding the people to work with, he says, is as much part of finding his own voice as finding a singing one.