Phil Selway remembers the first time he played with Radiohead

The first time Phil Selway played with the others in Radiohead, he tells the Italian site Il Post, was at a 24-hour charity music night in November 1985, where they covered the Beatles' “Dear Prudence”. Thom Yorke was there, and he thinks Ed O'Brien and Colin Greenwood were too. They were all at the same school in Abingdon, he recalls, with him and O'Brien the oldest and Yorke and Colin a year younger, and he had seen the others in the corridors without ever really talking to them.

Pier Mauro Tamburini's interview comes days after Familial, Selway's solo record, came out on Bella Union. He never touches a drum on it. He sings and plays classical guitar. He decided to make it about three years ago, after his mother died and he turned 40.

The first time he heard the band on the radio, Drill had just come out and they were touring Britain in a van. That Sunday the DJ Gary Davies made one of the band's songs his single of the weekend. They had been playing for seven years, he says, and suddenly everything seemed to be working.

Radiohead hardly ever argue, which he calls very English and probably not healthy. We're a passive-aggressive band.¹ His first solo concert, in Turin in March, left him petrified.

He and Jonny Greenwood were asked to record a song for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire with Jarvis Cocker and Steve Mackey of Pulp, and were then asked to play the band, the Weird Sisters, on screen. It was an honour, the kind of thing you can't do if you play in Radiohead.¹

Asked about O'Brien saying in May that the record the band are making now is their best, Selway laughed. That Ed says that about every album.¹