Phil Selway

Phil Selway talks to an interviewer from Halifax before a gig at the Minster there, where he plays his own opening set and then goes straight back behind the drum kit with Lanterns on the Lake. His first gig, at 15 or 16 with a school band, was on a kit he had never sat behind. He thinks he got away with it, and has been trying to get that confidence back ever since.

Between starting at the end of 1985 and signing at the end of 1991, he reckons, the band played seven or eight shows, because they were at college in different parts of the country and wrote in the holidays. One was a ball at the LSE, booked by a friend who ran the entertainments, where On a Friday, then an eight-piece with three saxophones, opened for Boney M.

Oxford opened up after Ride. Mac, who promoted at the Jericho Tavern, where they were signed, and Nick Moorbath, who opened the Zodiac, turned a handful of East Oxford bands, Supergrass among them, into something like a port town, with bands coming in and going out and sharing the same crew. Audiences stayed small until the first album; at the Princess Charlotte in Leicester it was one man and his dog. He worries that young bands now, doing so much themselves with less support, burn out faster, and is glad Radiohead were finding their feet when they did.