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Philip Selway to close his Familial run at Oxford's Pegasus Theatre
Philip Selway plays two shows of his solo songs at the Pegasus Theatre in Oxford on Thursday 10 and Friday 11 November, raising money for the theatre's work giving young people a way into the creative arts. Selway, a patron of the Pegasus, announced the nights himself on Dead Air Space, the band's blog, on 18 October, and they open the theatre's 50th anniversary year. Tickets are £25 from his ticket store or the box office.
In a piece in his own words for Cherwell, the Oxford student paper, Selway says the two nights close his work on Familial, his first solo album. Every song on it took root around Oxford, so that is where he is putting them to bed. After eight years working the one furrow, he does not know where he goes next.
Familial grew out of Selway learning to sing and to write songs, and he built the instruments around whatever voice he found. He had been part of Radiohead's songwriting from the start, but it still felt like starting again. The drums went to Glenn Kotche of Wilco, one of his favourite musicians. When I was writing my songs I couldn't really hear drum parts.
2 Kotche's percussion kept space in the songs without a strong backbeat.
Of the band, after what he counts as 25 years in it, Selway points to the turns from OK Computer to Kid A and from In Rainbows to The King of Limbs. With Radiohead, each record seems to be a reaction to the last one.
2 The five come from a similar place musically, but there is no party line, and the friction in any creative partnership is its fuel.
He credits EMI with a very skilled marketing department, and calls the pay-what-you-want download of In Rainbows an attempt to connect with people. In Rainbows wasn't a two fingers up at the corporate structure.
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