Philip Selway: “I don't think we could do a soundtrack together”

Philip Selway says Radiohead could never score a film as a band, even though he, Jonny Greenwood and Thom Yorke have each now written for the screen. A score, he says, needs one composer at the heart of the project. Noisey has the interview in English.

Honestly, it's not something we could do as a group; I don't think we could do a soundtrack together.

Philip Selway²

He was talking by telephone to Juan Sebastián Barriga Ossa of Noisey en Español, ahead of the Latin American release on 27 October of his score for Let Me Go. He worked on it between Radiohead commitments, some of it in the mornings before the band's studio sessions for A Moon Shaped Pool, and recorded parts of it in the same space. Polly Steele's film, from Helga Schneider's memoir and starring Juliet Stevenson, follows a woman whose mother left her to join the SS. The music is for acoustic guitar and string quartet. He had never written for a string quartet before.

What he values most in Radiohead is the moment each of them brings an idea and the others take the song somewhere nobody expected, an understanding built over decades of playing together. When this happens, it's something almost inexplicable, and that's the most moving thing.²