Phil Selway recorded Familial at Radiohead's studio without telling them

Phil Selway, Radiohead's drummer, began recording his first solo album, Familial, at Radiohead's studio outside Oxford in September 2009, and did not tell the rest of the band. I just wanted to make sure I was happy with it before I put it out there for that kind of scrutiny³, he told Relix in New York in the summer.

The record, out since the end of August on Bella Union in Britain and Nonesuch in the US, grew out of Neil Finn's Seven Worlds Collide sessions in New Zealand. Selway drummed there, played guitar, sang lead and wrote two songs, and he came home with the confidence that he could make a record. The sessions gave him his players too: Lisa Germano, Sebastian Steinberg, and two of Wilco, Glenn Kotche on drums and Pat Sansone on keyboards and guitar. Both his Seven Worlds Collide songs are on Familial, “The Ties That Bind Us” as it was recorded in New Zealand and the closing “The Witching Hour” as his original demo. That one carries a passing reference to Ed O'Brien's stag weekend, about which Selway will say only that they went camping and it was a good weekend.

He told The Quietus that singing backing vocals in Radiohead had not prepared him to sing lead, and that he had to learn to do it properly. His first demos were a guitar and him whispering the melodies, because he did not yet think he could sing. The arrangements started out much bigger and were cut back around the voice he found. At first he thought of having no drums or percussion on it at all; Kotche came up with parts Selway could not hear himself.

He tells Clash that in Radiohead he has always worked on the arrangements. But the lyrics all come from Thom's mind. I can't get in there and I wouldn't want to if I'm honest¹. Asked backstage at London's Royal Festival Hall, between rehearsals, what the next Radiohead album sounds like, he said we literally don't know until we've finished. We get to a certain point and we stop, and completely review everything.²

The first ideas go back seven or eight years, and three or four years ago he had a group of songs that did not feel right for Radiohead. “Broken Promises” comes most directly from the death of his mother. The record is about the relationships that matter across a life, how they shape a person and are shaped in return, and less, he says, about heart and home than some reviews made out. I don't think it's blueberry pie at all. It's more death by chocolate.²