Phil Selway

abingdon

Philip James Selway was born on 23 May 1967 and grew up in Oxfordshire with two older sisters. At the end of the 1970s their records came through the bedroom walls, King Crimson and Pink Floyd and the Clash, and he took the post-punk side. The Beat's I Just Can't Stop It was a present for his 13th birthday. Stephen Morris's drumming on Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures shaped his own. He got his first drum kit at 16 and started writing songs at the same time.

At Abingdon School he and Ed O'Brien were older than Thom Yorke and Colin Greenwood, and he passed the younger two in the corridors without a word. The first time he played with Yorke, and he thinks with O'Brien and Colin Greenwood too, was the Beatles' “Dear Prudence”, at a 24-hour charity event in November 1985. He played a few things with them that year, and told Stereogum that he properly joined On a Friday, as Radiohead were first called, at the start of 1986.

We were at school, but we kind of… it didn't grow out of the friendship at school, it grew out of… seeing each other and thinking we could be a good band together.

Phil Selway · CBC, 24 April 2023

liverpool

He read English and history at Liverpool Polytechnic. In 1986 he joined the band, met his wife and, at the start of his degree, picked up a leaflet for the Samaritans. By the end of the year, at 19, he had trained as one of their listening volunteers. Those were “all the things that really defined who I became as an adult”, he told Stereogum in 2023. The charity worked round a band that kept taking him away, and the calls balanced out the madder side of his life.

The band hardly played a gig for five years, he told Rolling Stone; they rehearsed in practice halls. He worked for a while as a teacher, and his favourite day job was in publishing, as a copy editor and production assistant. They had grown up wanting to play the Jericho Tavern in Oxford, and at the end of 1991 they were signed after one of their shows there.

ok computer

The autumn of 1993 caught up with him. At the start of the year the band had been driving round in a Transit, and by the autumn “Creep” was all over MTV in America, as he told Mark Radcliffe on BBC Radio 2 in 2010. On the US tour his nerves went into his timing. At one show the bill had Blondie's Clem Burke on drums. “Clem was my absolute drummer hero but I just hit peak overwhelm, and my drumming went off a cliff,” he told The Guardian in 2026. He rang his wife on very expensive calls home, and afterwards one of the band's managers raised it with him gently, which he calls invaluable.

John Leckie, who produced The Bends, told him he played drums as if he were playing guitar. The title track on the record is the first take they got at the Manor in 1994, because he wanted to get away and look at a house to rent. On OK Computer Nigel Godrich gave him and Yorke a couple of hours to make a loop in the style of DJ Shadow for “Airbag”. A day and a half later they had one. He played the record on a cherry-red Premier kit, and the tour that followed, he told Rolling Stone, was when “the imposter syndrome starts to kick in pretty strongly”.

In June 1998, at the launch of a Samaritans campaign for 15 to 24-year-olds in London, he talked in public for the first time about his 11 years as a volunteer, and NME called him the first musician to back one of the charity's campaigns. He was still doing regular shifts.

Phil Selway on MTV, December 1997the whole interview →

kid a and the thief

On Kid A the rhythm tracks were often built from sections of his drumming, cut into loops. A listener asked on XFM in September 2000 whether he minded that it was all drum machines, and he said there was a fair bit of him on there and he did not feel left out. Playing to sequencers, he told Mono in 2014, pushed him to new dynamics, and electronics became part of the dialogue. In the same sessions he found the beat of “Pyramid Song”, which went on Amnesiac, only when he stopped counting and followed Yorke's piano.

In April 2001 he went to Auckland with O'Brien for Neil Finn's 7 Worlds Collide, because they needed a drummer and O'Brien put him forward. Until then he had only ever really played in Radiohead. Halfway through Hail to the Thief he and O'Brien worked out its running order. “It was Phil and Ed,” Yorke told Rolling Stone. On 22 May 2003, the night before his 36th birthday, the Manchester Apollo sang him “Happy Birthday”, and Dave Simpson's review in The Guardian named him the unsung star of the band.

The Samaritans took more of his time in public. In February 2002 he opened their new centre on Magdalen Road in Oxford, and that April he ran the London Marathon for them in about four and a half hours. Everyone who sponsored him went into a draw for the cherry-red Premier kit from the OK Computer sessions. In November 2003, for the Samaritans' 50th anniversary, he told BBC Radio 4's You and Yours why he had stayed a volunteer and how Samaritans volunteers are trained to listen.

Even though… it sounds quite a passive thing to do, to actually listen, it's actually… a very active process. You listen to the spaces in between what people are telling you.

Phil Selway · BBC Radio 4, 6 November 2003

Phil Selway talking to a TV interviewer after a show in Canada, 3 August 2001the whole interview →

familial

Jarvis Cocker and Jason Buckle were writing songs for the Yule Ball in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the 2005 film, Selway told Stereogum, and he offered himself as the drummer. He and Jonny Greenwood were in the band that played them. In June 2005 he played for two of Merce Cunningham's dance Events at the Barbican in London.

His mother died suddenly in the early hours of 10 May 2006, and Radiohead moved the second of their two nights in Amsterdam to 28 August. “Mum was a big Radiohead fan,” he said. She is the subject of “Broken Promises” on his first record, and he has said he decided to make it after she died and he turned 40. He had written songs as a teenager, and once the band began they took a back seat for something like a decade, he told Noisey.

At the end of 2008 he went back to New Zealand for the second 7 Worlds Collide record, and told New Zealand's TV3 why he had come. Finn heard the songs Selway had been writing and asked why he didn't go and record them. On 5 January 2009, at the Powerstation in Auckland, he sang “The Family Madness” alone with a guitar, the first time he had sung a song of his own on stage. On The Sun Came Out, the record for Oxfam that came of the sessions, he wrote and sang “The Ties That Bind Us” and “The Witching Hour”.

Familial came out on Bella Union on 30 August 2010, credited to Philip Selway. While he was writing it he could not hear drums in the songs, he told Spinner, and Glenn Kotche of Wilco plays the drums on it; the singer Lisa Germano is on it too. It reached number 18 on the UK independent chart. His first show with Germano had been in Turin that March, and at Bestival somebody shouted for “Idioteque”.

two drummers

The King of Limbs was built from loops, and to play it live Radiohead took a second drummer on the road. Clive Deamer of Portishead played his first show with them at Glastonbury on 24 June 2011. Selway counts him among his favourite drummers. The 2012 tour with two kits, and then making his second album, Weatherhouse, “really fired me up about drumming again”, he told Rolling Stone.

On 16 June 2012 the stage at Downsview Park in Toronto collapsed at about four in the afternoon, before the show, and killed Scott Johnson, the band's drum technician. That August Selway announced the bursary fund Johnson's parents had set up to buy instruments for young musicians in Rotherham. In 2017 he told CBC that the band's soundcheck had been due to start at four o'clock. “I actually should have been where Scott was, and that is an incredible weight,” he said, “and I can't, personally I can't let this lie.”

Weatherhouse came out in October 2014, made as a trio with Adem Ilhan and Quinta, and Ilhan coaxed him back behind the kit for it. The same three wrote the music for Rambert Event, Rambert's staging of extracts from ten Merce Cunningham works.

By then Selway had gone from listening volunteer to one of the Samaritans' ambassadors, after 15 years by the charity's count and 17 by The Independent's.

It's not about the five individuals. It's suddenly… this homogeneous thing that is working… And when you're lost in that, that's amazing.

Phil Selway · The Talkhouse Music Podcast, June 2015

While the band made A Moon Shaped Pool he spent the mornings writing the score for Polly Steele's film Let Me Go. Back on stage, “Let Down” returned in 2016 after so many years that muscle memory was no help. “You're not being a tribute band to yourself,” he told Reverb.

strange dance

On 29 March 2019, at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, he and O'Brien were the only two of the five who went to Radiohead's induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He said he could still put himself back in his first rehearsal with the band, at the school they all went to, and said: “We may not be the greatest musicians around and we're certainly not the most media-friendly of bands. But we have become very adept at being Radiohead.”

He had backed Independent Venue Week, for the small rooms bands start in, from the first one, in 2014. For its tenth, in 2023, it named him the first of its anniversary ambassadors, and his week of small rooms opened at Norwich Arts Centre on 30 January and took in the Trades Club in Hebden Bridge, with Samaritans volunteers at every show. “As far as I know, we're still a band,” he told SPIN that January.

Strange Dance came out on Bella Union on 24 February 2023, produced by Marta Salogni at Evolution Studios in Oxford. He went in to drum on it and “sacked myself after a day-and-a-bit”, he told Prog, and Salogni suggested Valentina Magaletti, who plays the drums and percussion. The title song had begun about 20 years earlier as a little guitar ditty. The record reached number eight on the UK independent chart, and he thinks of Familial, Weatherhouse and Strange Dance as a trilogy.

Part of my original fantasy was I'd be invited in to do the drumming, and… I did that for a day, but it just wasn't happening.

Phil Selway · The John Fugelsang Podcast, 30 September 2023

That year he played drums on Lanterns on the Lake's Versions of Us, and in August took Strange Dance to St Canice's Cathedral in Kilkenny with members of the Irish Chamber Orchestra.

Phil Selway at Norwich Arts Centre during Independent Venue Week, January 2023· BBC Radio 6the whole interview →

back on the road

“Last year, we got together to rehearse, just for the hell of it,” began his message of 3 September 2025 announcing Radiohead's 20 nights in Europe. Chris Vatalaro, who had drummed in Selway's own band in 2023, took Deamer's place, on Selway's recommendation. Samaritans volunteers were at all four nights at the O2 in London.

He drums on the title track and “Sweet Spot” on O'Brien's Blue Morpho, which came out in May 2026, and O'Brien said he came “for an afternoon and absolutely nailed it”. On 23 July he played with the Unthanks and Royal Northern Sinfonia at Middlesbrough Town Hall, the first BBC Prom held in the town, keeping time with the Unthank sisters' clog dancing.

On 8 September the Pay It Forward Fund was launched, with him among its founding funders, to pay for therapists for musicians and crew on small tours, the help Radiohead's own touring party had in 2025. Five days later, on 13 September, he marked 40 years since he first trained as a Samaritans listening volunteer.