Radiohead's Philip Selway on what the band learned from touring with R.E.M.

Radiohead were right at the point of becoming one of the most important groups of their generation when they went out on tour to support of R.E.M. in 1995. The timing couldn’t have been better. Michael Stipe & co. were seasoned pros by then, a band who were rooted in arty alternative-rock but had found a way to continue doing that as a big mainstream proposition, exactly the scenario that Radiohead would soon be juggling. Speaking to this writer a couple of years ago, Radiohead drummer Philip Selway said it was a valuable, instructive period for the Oxford five-piece.

Asked if they was anyone who had given him great advice across his career, Selway said, “It’s not so much what people have told you, it’s watching other people and seeing how they operate. When we went out and toured with R.E.M., which was around The Bends, it was seeing how they managed to have that artistic integrity at the level they were operating at, seeing how they were just decent people, basically. You learn by example rather than somebody being quite didactic about it.”

Selway added that there would always be someone out there who is further down the road than you. “And that’s for good reason,” he continued, “because they’ve been good at what they do and seeing them work up close, it’s a real privilege, but there’s so much of use that you can take from that as well.”

Radiohead have been inactive as an entity since concluding the tour to support 2016’s A Moon Shaped Pool , but its members have hardly been idle. Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood are currently on tour in support of the second record by their side-project The Smile, Selway released his third solo album Strange Dance last year, bassist Colin Greenwood has been playing with Nick Cave and guitarist Ed O’Brien is currently working on the follow-up to his 2020 solo debut Earth .

Selway said the work the band members do away from Radiohead benefits the group when they do finally get together. “Those things are really important because everything that you learn there, like with all of us in the band, we then bring that back into this wider project of that. I've loved doing all of my solo work and to me, there feels like a real arc to the development in there.”